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[30 Ct 

Appletons' 
Lw Handy-Volume Series. 



rABLE-TALK. 



TO WHICH ARE ADDED 

GINARY CONVERSATIONS Ol 
POPE AND SWIFT. 

BY 

LEIGH HUNT 




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TABLE-TALK. 

g TO WHICH ARE ADDED 

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS OP 
POPE AND SWIPT. 



BT 



LEIGH HUNT. 



NEW YORK: 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

549 AND 551 BKOADWAT. 
1879. 



T/?4?/^ 






Gift 
'^ S ""'OS 



i 



PREFACE TO ORIGIML EDITION. 



The title of ttds volnme, " Taele-Talk," 
will, it is hoped, be found by the reader to be 
warranted by the conversational turn of the 
style, as well as the nature and variety of the 
subjects touched upon, and the manner in which 
they are treated. Some portion was really 
talked ; and it may be said of the rest, that the 
thoughts have, in all probability, passed the 
writer's lips in conversation. 

The " Imaginary Conversations of Pope and 
Swift '' were considered an appropriate addition 
to a volume of " Table-Talk," and are intended 
strictly to represent both the turn of style and 
of thinking of these two poets; though the 
thoughts actually expressed are the writer's 
invention. 



4 PREFACE. 

On correcting the sheets for press, I am not 
aware of any remark that I should particularly 
wish to modify, with the exception of some- 
thing that is said of Germany in the course of 
the article on " Goethe." I have since become 
better acquainted with the great intellects of 
that nation, which has unquestionably produced 
the leading thinkers of the century. The 
world has yet to learn the extent of its obliga- 
tions to such men as Goethe and Schiller, to 
Lessing, to Kant, to Herder, Richter, Fichte, 

and others. 

Leigh Hunt. 



CONTENTS 





PAGE 


Table-Talk ..... 


. 11 


Ladies carving at Dinner 


13 


Anomalies of Dishes and Furniture, etc. 


.14 


Topics for Dinner 


. 1^ 


Wild Flowers, Furze, and Wimbledon 


. 17 


Mistakes of the Press 


21 


May-Time ..... 


. 22 


Malice of Fortune 


25 


Bishops and Brahmins 


. 25 


The "Blessed Restoration" . 


80 


The Sun . . . 


. 32 


Bon-mot of a Coachman 


32 


Song of the Nightingale . 


. 34 


Oyid . 


35 


The Voice of the Rook . 


. 35 


Row Lawyers go to Heaven . 


36 


Collins, the Poet .... 


. 36 


A Fact ...... 


40 


The Two Conquerors 


. 41 


Clerical Titles . 


41 


Horace Walpole and Pinkerton . 


. 42 


Jews ...... 


44 



CONTENTS. 



Smollett .... 

Chemistry 

Petty Conveniences and Comforts 

Tears .... 

Dr. Aldrich 

Lord Marchmont's Receipt for Longevity 

The American Revolution 

Discoverers of America 

Wonder never ceases 

Daly, the Dublin Manager . 

Light and Colors . 

Yersions of Ancient Lyrics . 

Catharine II. of Russia . 

Petrarch and Laura . 

Moral and Personal Courage 

Tight-Lacing . 

Gravity and Industry of Dancers 

Advertisements 

Sportsmen and Custom 

Bears and their Hunters 

Self-Stultification ^ . 

Cowslips 

April Fools 

Private War . 

Beaumarchais 

Mozart .... 

Yiolet~with a Difference 

Verbal Mistakes of Foreigners 

Hume and the Three Little Kings 

A Charming Creature . 

Bacon .... 

Suicides of Butlers . 

Duels .... 

LiSTON .... 



CONTENTS. 



Steeple-Chasing . 

Turkeys . . . . 

Bagpipes .... 

C^SAR AND Bonaparte 

Pseudo-Christianity 

Dyed Hair . . . , 

Eating .... 

Poland and Kosciusko 

England and the Pope (Gregory) 

The Duke of Wellington's Concert 

War, Dinner, and Thanksgiving . 

Fires and Martyrdom 

Kespectability 

Use of the Word "Angel,'' etc., 

Eloquence op Omission . 

Gods of Homer and Lucretius 

An Inyisible Relic 

A Natural Mistake . 

Mortal Good Effects of Matrimony 

Umbrellas 

Booksellers' Devices 

Women on the Right Side , 

Shenstone mistaken 

The Marseilles Hymn 

Non-Sequitur 

Non-Rhymes 

Stothard . 

The Countenance after Death 

Hume 

Gibbon .... 

Angels and Flowers 

An Enviable Distress 

Sir Thomas Dyot . 

Ancient and Modern Example 



7 

page 



IN Love-making 



CONTENTS. 



Milton and his Portraits 
William Hay . 
Bishop Corbet 

HOADLT 

Voltaire . 

Handel 

Montaigne 

Waller 

Otttay 

Raphael and Michael Angelo 

Wax and Honey . 

Associations with Shakespeare 

Bad Great Men . 

Cicero .... 

Flowers in winter 

Charles Lamb . 

Sporting . 

Wisdom of the Head and of the Heart 

M^CENAS . 

Lord Shaftesbury's Experience of Matrimony 

A Philosopher thrown from his Horse 

Worlds of Different People 

Mrs. Siddons 

Non-Necessity of Good Words to Music 

Goethe .... 

Bacon and James I. . 

Goldsmith's Life of Beau Nash . 

Julius C^sar .... 

Fenelon .... 

Spenser and the Month of August 

Advice .... 

Eclipses, Human Beings, and the Lower Creation 

Easter-Day and the Sun, and English Poetry . 

The Five-Pound Note and the Gentleman . 



CONTENTS. 



9 



Paisiello ...... 

Cakdinal Alberoni 

Sir William Petty the Statist and Mechanical 
losopher ..... 

Name of Linn^us .... 

John Buncle (the Hero op the Book so called) 
PoussiN ..... 

Prior ..... 

Burke and Paine 

The Dutch at the Cape . 

Russian-Horn Band . 

Dogs and their Masters . 

Body and Mind 

Want of Imagination in the Comfortable 

The Singing Man kept by the Birds 

A Strange Heaven 

Standing Godfather . 

Magnifying Trifles 

Relics .... 

Solitude .... 

Louis XIY. and George IV. . 

Henry IV. of France and Alfred 

Fellows of Colleges . 

Beauty a Joy in Heayen 

Associations op Glastonbury 

Liberty of Speech 

Writing Poetry 

The Women of Italy 

French People 

The Blind . 

London 

Southey's Poetry . 

Vulgar Calumny 

Value of Acquirements 



PAGE 

. 167 
168 



Phi- 



10 CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

The Beard . . . . . . 195 

Attractions of Ham . . . . .195 

Sleeping under the Sky . . . ,196 

War Poetry . . . . . .197 

money-getting . . . . .198 

Value of Words ...... 198 

Unwritten Revelations . . . .198 

Weeping ....... 199 



IMAGINAEY CONYERSATIONS OP POPE AND SWIFT. 

Conversation of Pope . . * . . 203 

Conyersation of Swift and Pope . . .221 



TABLE-TALK. 



TABLE-TALK 



Is so natural to man, that the mouth is the organ 
both of eating and speaking. The tongue is set 
flowing by the bottle. Johnson talked best when 
he dined ; Addison could not talk at all till he 
drank. Table and conversation interchange their 
metaphors. We devour wit and argument, and 
discuss a turkey and chine. That man must be 
very much absorbed in reflection, or stupid, or 
sulky, or unhappy, or a mere hog at his trough, 
who is not moved to say something when he 
dines. The two men who lived with no other 
companions in the Eddystone Lighthouse, and 
who would not speak to one another during their 
six months, must have been hard put to it when 
they tapped a fresh barrel. To be sure, the great- 
er the temptation the greater the sulk ; but the 
better-natured of the two must have found it a 
severe struggle on a very fine or very foggy day. 
Table-talk, to be perfect, should be sincere 



12 TABLE-TALK. 

without bigotry, differing without discord, some- 
times grave, always agreeable, touching on deep 
points, dwelling most on seasonable ones, and let- 
ting everybody speak and be heard. During the 
wine after dinner, if the door of the room be 
opened, there sometimes comes bursting up the 
drawing-room stairs a noise like that of a tap- 
room. Everybody is shouting in order to make 
himself audible ; argument is tempted to con- 
found itself with loudness ; and there is not one 
conversation going forward, but six, or a score. 
This is better than formality and want of spirits ; 
but it is no more the right thing than a scramble 
is a dance, or the tap-room chorus a quartet of 
Rossini. The perfection of conversational inter- 
course is when the breeding of high life is ani- 
mated by the fervor of genius. 

Nevertheless, the man who can not be loud, or 
even vociferous on occasion, is wanting on the 
jovial side of good-fellowship. Chesterfield, with 
all his sense and agreeableness, was but a solemn 
fop when he triumphantly asked whether any- 
body had "ever seen him laugh?" It was as 
bad as the jealous lover in the play who says : 
"Have Jheen the life of the company? Have I 
made you all die with merriment ? " And there 
were occasions, no doubt, when Chesterfield might 
have been answered as the lover was : " No ; to 
do you justice, you have been confoundedly 
stupid." 



LADIES CARVING AT DINNER. 13 

Luckily for table-talkers in general, they need 
be neither such fine gentlemen as Chesterfield, 
nor such oracles as Johnson, nor such wits as 
Addison and Swift, provided they have nature 
and sociability, and are not destitute of reading 
and observation. 



LADIES OARymG AT DUsTNTEB. 

Why doesn't some leader of the fashionable 
world put an end to this barbarous custom ? 
What a sight, to see a delicate little creature, or, 
worse perhaps, a " fine woman," in all the glory 
of her beauty and bedizenment, rise up with a 
huge knife in her hand, as if she were going to 
act the part of Judith, and begin heaving away 
at a great piece of beef ! For the husband does 
not always think it necessary to take the more 
laborious dish on himself. Sometimes the lady 
grows as hot and flustered as the housewife in the 
" Winter's Tale," " her face o' fire with labor." 
Gentlemen feel bound to offer their services, and 
become her substitutes in that unseemly warfare. 
Why don't they take the business on themselves 
at once ? or, rather, why don't they give it to the 
servants, who have nothing better to do, and who 
have eaten their own meal in comfort ? A side- 
table is the proper place for carving. Indeed, it 
is used for that purpose in some great houses. 
Why not in all ? It is favorable for additional 



14 TABLE-TALK. 

means of keeping the dishes hot ; nobody at the 
dinner-table is inconvenienced ; and the lady of 
the house is not made a spectacle of, and a sub- 
ject for ridiculous condolements. None would 
regret the reformation but epicures who keep on 
the watch for tidbits, to the disadvantage of hon- 
est diners, and whom it would be a pleasure to 
see reduced from shocking oglers at the hostess 
into dependents on the plebeian carver. 

A:t^OMALIES OF DISHES AKD FUROTTURE, Etc. 

Among the customs at table which deserve to 
be abolished is that of serving up dishes that re- 
tain a look of ^^ life in death " — codfish with their 
staring eyes, hares with their hollow countenances, 
etc. It is in bad taste, an incongruity, an anoma- 
ly ; to say nothing of its effect on morbid imagi- 
nations. 

Even furniture would be better without such 
inconsistencies. Claws, and hands, and human 
heads are not suited to the dead wood of goods 
and chattels. A chair should not seem as if it 
could walk off with us ; nor a table look like a 
monstrous three-footed animal, with a great flat 
circular back, and no head. It is such furniture 
as the devil might have had in Pandemonium — 
*' Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire." 

A lady sometimes makes tea out of a serpent's 
mouth ; and a dragon serves her for a seat in a 



TOPICS FOR DINNER. 15 

garden. This is making a witch of her, instead 
of a Venus or a Flora. Titania did not sit on a 
toadstool, but on a bank full of wild thyme and 
violets. 

This bad taste is never more remarkably ex- 
emplified than in the case of fountains. The 
world seems to have given fountains a privilege 
for exciting incongruous and filthy ideas ; for 
nobody, as far as I am aware (except Pope, by 
an implication), has protested against their im- 
possible combinations and vomiting mouths ; than 
which nothing surely can be more ridiculous or 
revolting. A fountain should suggest nothing 
but feelings of purity and freshness ; yet they 
go to the reverse extreme, and seem to endeavor 
to make one sick. 

TOPICS FOR DINTNER. 

What a thing it is to sit down to dinner, after 
reading of the miseries in starving countries ! 
One fancies one has no right to eat and drink. 
But the thought must be diverted ; not because 
the question is to be got rid of on every other 
occasion — quite the contrary ; but because, hav- 
ing done his best for it, great or small, then, and 
in that case only, the conscientious diner has a 
right to waive it. Dinner is a refreshment, and 
should be such, if possible, to everybody, and 
most of all to the anxious. Hence the topics 



16 TABLE-TALK. 

fittest for table are sucli as are cheerful, to help 
digestion ; and cordial, to keep people in heart 
with their fellow creatures. Lively anecdotes 
are of this description — good-humored personal 
reminiscences, literary chat, questions as easy to 
crack as the nuts, quotations flowing as the 
wine, thoughts of eyes and cheeks blooming 
as the fruit, and beautiful as those that have 
looked at us over the mutual glass. They poet 



*' What, and how great, the virtue of the art 
To hve on little with a cheerful heart. 
Let's talk, my friends, but talk before we dine ! " 

Yes, but not even then, just before we dine. 
A man's in a very bad disposition for living on 
little before he dines. He is much more disposed 
to do so afterward, particularly if he has eaten 
too much. The time for discussing anxious sub- 
jects, especially those that regard the poor, is 
neither at dinner, when the topic becomes almost 
indecent ; nor just before it, when hunger is self- 
ish ; nor just after it, when the feelings are too 
self-complacent ; but at moments when the pulse 
is lowered, without being too much so for reason ; 
though, indeed, if legislators could be kept with- 
out their dinners for some two or three days, there 
are occasions when people might be the better for 
it. Members of Parliament hardly see fair play 
between their dinner-bell and the calls of the 



WILD FLOWERS, FURZE, AND WIMBLEDON. 17 

many ; and, when the wine is in, the perfection of 
wittenagemot wisdom is apt to be out. The prince 
in Voltaire thought his people happy " when he 
had dined." 

" Quand il avait diii6, croyoit son peuple heureux." 

Luckily, we have princes, and a Parliament 
too (whatever be its faults), that can dine hap- 
pily, and yet not believe typhus and famine com- 
fortable. 



WILD FLOWEES, FUEZE, AND WIMBLEDON. 

Those flowers on the table are all wild flowers, 
brought out of ditches, and woodsides, and the 
common ; daisies and buttercups, ground-ivy, 
hyacinths, violets, furze : they are nothing better. 
Will all the wit of man make anything like them ? 

A, Yes, paintings. 

JS, And poetry and music. 

C. True ; but paintings can not be sown ; 
they can not come up again every spring, fresh 
and fresh, beautiful as ever. 

A. Paintings are sown by copyists and en- 
gravers. 

C, Very true indeed ; but still there is a dif- 
ference. Humphreys is not Correggio ; Linton is 
not Rembrandt ; Strange himself is not Titian. 
The immortal painter does not survive in person 
to make even his own reds and blues immortal as 
2 



18 TABLE-TALK. 

his name. Yet here is the hyacinth, as fresh as 
when it was first created. Here is Bums's 

" Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower," 

as new as if the great peasant had just turned it 
up with his plow. 

JB. Poetry seems as if it would last as long as 
flowers ; and it has no need of renewal. 

C, God forbid I should undervalue his most 
wonderful work here on earth, the creature who 
can himself create ! I wonder what they have to 
resemble, or surpass him, in the planets Mercury 
and Venus ? I suppose he gets better and better 
as he nears the sun ; and in the sun is the heaven 
we are all going to ; not the final heaven, but just 
a kind of celestial half-way house ; our own earth 
made' heavenly after a human fashion, to enable 
us to take by degrees to beatitude. 

JB. There have been worse fancies about the 
sun than that. 

JD. Don't condescend to mention 'em.* The 
very best must be unworthy of the orb whose 
heat and light are the instruments for making all 
these beautiful things. And yet, unless you would 
have everything there lilies and roses, can you can- 
ceive any covering fitter for the hills of the sun 

* Nothing is meant here to be insinuated against specula- 
tions like those of the ^' Vestiges " ; compared with which, 
nine tenths of all the theology that was ever theologized are 
but so much ignorant and often impious babble. 



WILD FLOWERS, FURZE, AND WIMBLEDON. 19 

itself than this magnificent furze, as it now ap- 
pears here in England, robing our heaths and 
commons all over the country ? 

There is an advertisement in the papers an- 
nouncing a building project at Wimbledon and 
Westhill. The houses are to occupy a portion of 
Wimbledon Park ; and boards are put among the 
trees by the roadside, boasting of the " fine front- 
age." Well may they boast of it, especially at 
this season of the year. It is a golden undula- 
tion ; a foreground, and from some points of view 
a middle distance, fit to make the richest paint- 
er despair ; a veritable Field of Cloth of Gold. 
Morning (Aurora, the golden goddess), when the 
dawn is of a fineness to match, must look beauty 
for beauty on it. Sunset is divine. The gold 
goes stretching away in the distance toward the 
dark trees, like the rich evening of a poetic life. 
No wonder Linnaeus, when he came to England 
and first beheld this glorious shrub in bloom, fell 
down on his knees, and thanked God that he had 
lived to see it. No wonder statesmen and poli- 
ticians go forth to lodge about the place for a lit- 
tle while, to procure air and refreshment ; perhaps 
to get a new lease of existence ; perhaps to die 
where they may still find something beautiful on 
earth — beautiful enough to comfort their mistakes 
about it, and to prepare them for a place where it 
is easier to look for flowers than revolutions. As 
to figures in the landscape, they are not many, nor 



20 TABLE-TALK. 

discordant ; such as a horse or two, a few cattle, 
now and then a horseman, or a sturdy peasant on 
foot, or a beauty in a barouche. Sometimes the 
peasant is aged, but hale ; or sturdy, though but 
a child ; — signs both of good air, and prosperity, 
and a true country spot. I hardly know which is 
the more pictmxsque sight — a fine, ruddy-cheeked 
little peasant-boy, not beyond childhood, coming 
along with a wheelbarrow full of this golden 
furze, his face looking like a bud a-top of it ; or 
a bent, hearty old man (bent with age, not with 
his perquisite) carrying off a bunch of it on his 
back, as if he triumphed over time and youth. 

Sometimes you meet a lady coming with a 
bunch of hyacinths ; sometimes a fine young fel- 
low of a gentleman, who has not disdained to 
stick a bit of furze in his coat. It is not the love 
of flowers that makes people effeminate, but in- 
door habits that produce a craving for stimulants 
and dread of trouble. This very Wimbledon Park 
was once occupied by a cultivator, and even 
painter of flowers, whom nobody that didn't know 
him, and beheld at his gentle tasks, would have 
suspected to have been General Lambert, one of 
the boldest and most independent of the officers 
of Cromwell. He lived there in the interval be- 
tween his rival's elevation to sovereign power and 
the return of Charles II., and was famous for the 
sums he gave for his pinks and tulips. 



MISTAKES OF THE PRESS. 21 

MISTAKES OF THE PRESS. 

The annals of law and typography contain the 
remarkable fact that an edition of the Bible was 
once printed, in which the word no% to the hor- 
ror and consternation of the religious world, was 
left out of the seventh commandment ! They 
called for its restoration with an impatience more 
creditable to their zeal than their sense of securi- 
ty ; while, on the other hand, some daring theo- 
logians (who, like the Catholics, did not think 
themselves tied in every respect to those letters 
of the old law) doubted whether, for the sake of 
the commandment itself, the omission had not 
better remain as it was, seeing that, " in nine cases 
out of ten, the prohibition was the temptation." 

Mistakes of the press have given rise to such 
ludicrous combinations, that a small wit (Caleb 
Whitford) obtained a reputation solely by a few 
articles about them in a newspaper. I never, in 
the course of my own experience, met with one 
of a more astounding aspect than the following. 
It is innocent of all scandal, or libel, or double 
meaning. It was a pure mistake of the printer, 
ludicrously unintelligible, and threw the readers 
into agonies of conjecture. The writer had ob- 
served that, " although there is no mention either 
of coffee or tobacco in the ^ Arabian Nights,' the 
former, from association of ideas with existing 
Eastern manners, always reminded him of that 



22 TABLE-TALK. 

delightful book" ; and then followed this ex- 
traordinary sentence : " as sucJcmg does for the 
snow season,^^ 

This mistake was so high, abundant, and ridic- 
ulous, that, if I remember rightly (for the article . 
was my own), I refused to correct it. I thought 
it better to leave it as it stood, for a perpetual 
pleasure of astonishment to all who might chance 
to light upon the pages in which it occurred. 

The proper words, however, were these : " as 
smoking does for the same reason.^^ 

MAY-TIME. 

Such a delightful commencement as we have 
had of the month of May is a perfect godsend ; 
for our climate is seldom so lucky. May is a 
pretty word ; a charming thing in books and po- 
ets ; beautiful always in some degree to look at, 
as far as hedges and trees go, whatever be the 
state of the weather ; that is to say, provided you 
can quit the fireside, and the windows are not too 
misty with rain to see through. But the hedges 
in general succeed better than the skies. There 
is apt to be more blossom than sunshine ; and 
people lie in bed on May-morning, and wonder 
what possessed their ancestors, to induce them to 
get up at dawn, and go poking about the wet 
bushes. 

I suspect it was never very easy to reckon 



MAY-TIME. 23 

npon a fine May-day in England. If the wind 
was in a good quarter, the chances were that it 
rained ; and, if the sky was clear, then probably 
the wind was in the east. 

" Rough winds do shake the darling duds of May," 

says a lovely verse in Shakespeare. Our ances- 
tors, however, had more out-of-door habits than 
we, and seem to have cared little for east winds. 
You hear a great deal more of north winds than 
east in the old writers. At the same time, we 
must not forget that our May-day comes nearly a 
fortnight sooner with us than it did with them. 
The change took place when the calendar was 
altered, about a hundred years back ; and the 
consequence was, that the May-day of our ances- 
tors now falls on the 12th of the month. The 
circumstance gave rise to some verses by Mr. 
Lovibond, a gentleman " about town " in the days 
of Chesterfield and Walpole, which the subject 
(and the prevailing bad taste in verses) rendered 
popular. They were called " The Tears of Old 
May-day." This is the way in which Mr. Lovi- 
bond laments : 

" Onward in consciom majesty she came," 

(To wit, poor May !) — 

'' The grateful houors of mankind to tastBy 
To gather fairest wreaths oi future farae^'* 

(What is the meaning of that ?) 



24 TABLE-TALK. 

" And blend fresh triumphs with her glories past. 

" Yain hope ! No more in choral bands unite 
Her virgin vot'ries ; and at early dawn, 
Sacred to May and Love's mysterious rite, 
Brush the light dew-drops from the spangled lawn. 

" To her no more Augusta's wealthy pride 

Pours the full tribute from Potosfs mine ! ! 
Nor fresh-blown garlands village maids provide, 
A purer offspring at her rustic shrine," etc., etc. 

What does the reader take to have been " the full 
tribute from Potosi's mine " ? It was the plate 
which the milkmaids used to borrow to decorate 
their Maypole. 

Compare with this stuff the fresh, impulsive 
verses and bright painting of Spenser : 

*' Then came/a^V May^ the fairest maid on ground. 
Decked all with dainties of her season's pride. 
And throwing flowers out of her lap around. 
Upon two brethren's shoulders she did ride, 
The twins of Leda : which, on either side. 
Supported her, like to their sovereign queen. 
Lord ! how all creatures laughed when her they spied ; 
And leaped and danced as they had ravished been ; 

And Cupid'' s self about her fluttered all in green.'''' 

If people, then, have a mind to try the proper 
old May-day, and be up and out of doors among 
the blossoms when Shakespeare was, or Spenser's 
Rosalind, or the pretty queen of Edward IV. 
(for royalty used to go a- Maying once), next 



MALICE OF FORTUNE. 25 

Tuesday is their time, supposing the weather 
favorable, and good folks "in a concatenation 
accordingly." Only they must take care how 
they are too merry ; otherwise, they will wake 
the Tractarian old lady next doj^r, who will think 
the world is going to be at an end if people are 
not as sleepy and stupid as herself. 

MALICE OF FORTUNE. 

Mr. Green, the aeronaut, has had an escape 
from a death which would have looked like a 
mockery. He was near being killed by his bal- 
loon, not aloft in the clouds, or by a descent like 
Phaeton, but in a cart in which he was riding 
upon it, like the Welshman on his cheese in the 
"Splendid Shilling." Mr. Green's courage is to 
be congratulated on not having brought him to so 
mock-heroical a pass. The greatest trick of this 
sort ever played by Fortune was the end of Bruce 
the traveler, who, after all his perils by flood and 
by field, from wars, from wild beasts, from des- 
erts, from savage nations, broke his neck down 
his own staircase at home ! It was owing to a 
slip of the foot, while seeing some visitors out 
whom he had been entertaining. 

This was the very anti-climax of adventure. 

BISHOPS AND BEAHMINS. 

I hold the Church of England in great respect 
for several reasons. One is, that it lets me hold 



26 TABLE-TALK. 

my own form of Christian opinion without moles- 
tation ; another, that having reformed itself once, 
and to no little extent, it can do so again, I have 
no doubt, and would to-morrow if it had its free 
way, and so give^the coup de grace in this coun- 
try to the last pretenses of Popery. A third rea- 
son is, that its clergy, upon the whole, and, con- 
sidering their number, are the best behaved, most 
learned and most reasonable, most gentle, most 
truly Christian, in Europe ; the occasional ex- 
cesses of individuals among them, however enor- 
mous, being far less than the crimes and catastro- 
phes of those in Catholic nations, originating in 
causes which need not be dwelt upon. 

But the reasonableness and well-tempered se- 
curity of ordinary clerical existence in this country 
give rise in some instances to scandals, injurious 
in proportion to their very seeming warrant. 

Why do bishops, who won't go to theatres, 
accept invitations to public dinners ? They had 
much better be seen at the representation of 
'^Lear" or ^^ Macbeth" than at a Lord Mayor's 
feast. It has an unseemly look at any time, 
especially in your fat bishop, and most especially 
when the reports of the feast in the newspapers 
are followed by accounts of the starving poor. 
If such tremendous inequalities in the social con- 
dition are not to be remedied, why mortify the 
sujBFerers ? And if they are, why exasperate them ? 
Reports of public dinners, let the guests be who 



BISHOPS AND BRAHMINS. 27 

they may, harmonize ill with those of the police- 
office and the Poor-Laws ; but, when bishops are 
among the diners, the scandal is doubled, and one 
is astonished they do not see it. But a bishop 
seems to see nothing else, when a dish is before 
him. Observe — the world would have no objec- 
tion to his being fat and jolly, if he made no 
saintly pretensions, or if he could square it with 
appearances in other respects, and his duties to 
the unfed. There is F., who is as fat as any one of 
them, and who has brains and activity enough for 
the whole bench. If they could all bestir them- 
selves in behalf of the poor as he does, and mani- 
fest as unclouded an intellect, I am not sure the 
public would not rejoice in their obesity, and re- 
gard it as the right and privilege of those who 
endeavored to spread a table for mankind. Who 
could have grudged his fat to Berkeley? or to 
Luther ? or to good Bishop Jewel (if he had it) ? 
or to that pattern of a prelate, who thought it a 
shame to have a hundred pounds in the hands of 
his steward ? But when bishops and their fami- 
lies grow rich, while the poor grow poorer, and 
when it is the rarest thing in the world (with the 
exception, now and then, of a Thirlwall or a Stan- 
ley) to find them attending a public meeting but 
for selfish or corporate purposes, people naturally 
dislike to see them fat and feeding, especially 
when they come in the lump together, as at these 
Lord Mayor's feasts. Bishops should never ap- 



28 TABLE-TALK. 

pear in flocks, like vultures. There is an adver- 
tiser of after-dinner pills, who recommends the 
drug by long lists of his patrons, including almost 
the whole of the right reverend bench. The sight 
is laughable, to say the least of it. Many honest 
friends of the Establishment think it deplorable. 
It is a positive proclamation of excess ; an osten- 
tation of apoplexy ; a telling the world, that to 
be a bishop and to want boxes of pills is the same 
thing. Or, if we are to take it as a mere matter 
of indifference and nonchalance, it becomes so 
much the worse. 

Advertiser [asking perniissi07i to hoast of his 
''favors'^''), "My Lord Bishop, may I tell the 
world what good my pills do to your lordship's 
indigestion ? " 

Bishop. " Oh, certainly." 

The Hindoo gentry have a custom among 
them of giving feeds to their bishops, the Brah- 
mins. It is a fashion — an emulation — and prac- 
ticed on great family occasions. Every nobleman 
tries how he can outdo the rest of his class in the 
number of reverend personages he can get to- 
gether, and the amount of food he can induce 
them to swallow. If only six Brahmins are 
brought to the verge of apoplexy, he thinks him- 
self ruined in the eyes of his neighbors. What 
will the world say if there is no sickness ? How 
can he hold up his head should no clergyman be 
carried away senseless ? Accordingly, toward the 



BISHOPS AND BRAHMINS. 29 

end of the entertainment, the host may be seen 
(this is no fiction) literally beseeching their lord- 
ships the Brahmins to get down another plate of 
curry. 

" I've eaten fourteen," says one of them, gasp- 
ing. 

" And I fifteen," says another. 

" For God's sake," says the host. 

" Impossible," says the Brahmin. 

"But consider, my dear lord, you ate seven- 
teen at Ram Bulkee's." 

" You are misinformed, my dear sir." 

"Pardon me, they were counted to his immor- 
tal honor." 

" Thirteen only, on — my — sacred word." 

" Don't favor me less, I implore you. See — 
only this one other mouthful." 

" Impracticable." 

" I've rolled it up, to render it the more easy." 

" Consider my jaws." 

"But, dear lord— " 

" Have pity on my oesophagus." 

" But my name, my name — " 

" My — dear — son, stomachs have their limits." 

"But not your lordship's generosity." 

Wife {interposing). "It will be the death of 
my husband, if you don't oblige him." 

"Well, this one — {swallowing). Ah — my — 
dear— son ! — {Aside to himself.) Why did our 
caste establish this custom ? It might have been 



30 TABLE-TALK. 

salutary once ; but now — O Ram ! Ram ! I can 
bear it no longer." 

One other mouthful, however, still is got down, 
the host is a man of such meritorious wealth ; yet 
he was obliged to implore it with tears in his eyes. 
The Brahmins in vain pointed to their own. The 
host, with inexorable pathos, entreats them to con- 
sider the feelings of his wife and children. The 
mouthful is achieved, Ram Bulkee beaten, and 
the reverend feasters are carried off to bed, very 
nearly victimized by "the wisdom of their an- 
cestors " and clarified butter. 

Such are the inconveniences that may arise 
from customs of our own contriving ; and such 
the corporate resemblances among the priesthood 
of the most distant countries, which Christian 
bishops might do well to avoid. 

THE *' BLESSED EESTOEATIOK" 

The public are beginning to show symptoms 
of dislike to the anniversary of what is equivo- 
cally called the blessed Restoration^ and the re- 
tention of it in so grave a place as the church. 
The objection is not new ; but it comes with new 
force at a time when some antics of superstition 
have induced the growing intelligence of the com- 
munity to look at the abuses of religion in general 
and to wish to see it freed from every species of 
scandal. People have certainly been in the habit 



THE "BLESSED RESTORATION.'^ 31 

of taking strange occasions for expressing their 
gratitude to Heaven ; and this " Blessed Restora- 
tion " is not one of the least extraordinary. At 
all events, the retention of it as a sacred day is 
extraordinary, when we consider how long it is 
since the character of Charles and his court have 
been a by-word. But the custom was retained 
for the same reason that set it up — not to thank 
God, but to spite those who differed. The gusto 
of the gratitude was in proportion to the suffer- 
ings of the enemy. Cromwell thanked God for 
the head of Charles the First on a scaffold, and 
Charles the Second thanked God for the head of 
Cromwell on a gibbet. The defenders of the an- 
niversary, if they spoke the truth, would have 
vindicated themselves on the plea that they did 
not thank God for Charles at all. To thank Him 
for Charles would have been to thank Him for 
Cleveland and Buckingham ; for the pension from 
the French king, and all sorts of effronteries and 
enormities. Oh, no ; the decorous men hated 
those. It was for no vice they feted him. It was 
for the virtuous pleasure of galling their neigh- 
bors, and of doing honor to Mother Church her- 
self, who condescended to be led back to her seat 
by the hand of the gay deceiver. 

Now, Mother Church on that occasion was not 
the right, unpapal, unpuritanical unsophisticate 
Mother Church, old as no church at all, and ever 
young as advancement, but one of her spurious 



32 TABLE-TALK. 

representatives ; and society is awaking to the 
necessity of having no more such masqueraders, 
but seeing the beautiful, gentle, altogether Chris- 
tian creature as she is, professing nothing that she 
does not believe, and believing nothing that can 
offend the wisest. Tillotson, Berkeley, Which- 
cote, have had sight of her. Charles the Second's 
chaplains knew no more of her than Dr. Philpotts. 

THE SUiT. 

No mystery in creation need sadden us, as long 
as we believe nothing of the invisible world infe- 
rior to what the visible proclaims. Life and geni- 
ality predominate ; d^ath is brief ; pain fugitive ; 
beauty universal ; order paramount and everlast- 
ing. What a shame, to know that the sun, the 
greatest visible object in our universe, combines 
equal gentleness with power, and does us nothing 
but good, and at the same time to dare to think 
worse of its Maker ! 

BON-MOT OF A COACHMAN. 

Commendation beforehand is usually but a 
bad preface to a jest, or to anything else ; yet I 
must say that I never heard anything more to the 
purpose than the reply made to a shabby fellow by 
the driver of an omnibus. Shabby, on hailing the 
omnibus, had pathetically intimated that he had 
not more than a shilling, so that he could not pay 



BON-MOT OF A COACHMAN. 83 

the whole fare, which was eighteen pence. This 
representation in formd pauperis the driver good- 
naturedly answered by desiring the gentleman to 
get in. The journey being ended, Shabby, who 
had either been too loud in his pathos before the 
passengers, or too happy in the success of it, to 
think of getting change from them as he went 
(for it is manifest, from what followed, that he 
knew he had more than he pretended), was forced 
to develop from his purse a criminatory half- 
crown ! This solid body of self -refutation, with- 
out pretending any surprise on his own part at 
the possession of it, and thus availing himself of 
an obvious opportunity, he hands to the coachman 
with a dry request for the difference. The coach- 
man, still too good-natured to take any verbal 
notice of the pleasing apparition, but too wise 
not to do himself justice, returns twelve pence to 
Shabby. Shabby intimates his expectation of 
the sixpence. 

CoACHMAx. My fare, you know, sir, is eigh- 
teen pence. 

Shabby. Yes ; but you said I was to ride for 
a shilling. 

Coachman. I did ; but you gave me to under- 
stand that you had no more in your pocket. 

Shabby. A bargain's a bargain. 

Coachman. Well, then, sir, to tell you the 
truth, you must know that I am the greatest liar 
on the road, 
3 



34 TABLE-TALK. 

SOISTG OF THE NIGHTINGALE. 

The question respecting the mirth or melan- 
choly of the nightingale, which of late years is 
supposed to have been settled in favor of the 
gayer side by some fine lines of Coleridge's, sure- 
ly resolves itself into a simple matter of associa- 
tion of ideas. Chaucer calls the notes of the bird 
"merry " ; but the word merry ^ in Chaucer's time, 
signified something alive and vigorous after its 
hind ; as in the instance of "merry men" in the 
old ballads, and " merry England " ; which did 
not mean a nation or set of men always laughing 
and enjoying themselves, but in good hearty con- 
dition — a state of manhood befitting men. This 
point is determined beyond a doubt by the same 
poet's application of the word to the organ, as 
the " merry organ " — meaning the chicrch-orgaHy 
which, surely, however noble and organic, is not 
merry in the modern sense of the word. 

The whole matter I conceive to be this. The 
notes of the nightingale, generally speaking, are 
not melancholy in themselves, but melancholy 
from association with night-time, and from the 
grave reflections which the hour naturally pro- 
duces. They may be said to be melancholy also 
in the finer sense of the word (such as Milton uses 
in his " Penseroso "), inasmuch as they express 
the utmost intensity of vocal beauty and delight ; 
for the last excessive feelins^s of delio;ht are al- 



OYID. 35 

ways grave. Levity does not do them honor 
enough, nor sufficiently acknowledge the appeal 
they make to that finiteness of our nature which 
they force unconsciously upon a sense of itself, 
and upon a secret feeling of our own capabilities 
of happiness compared with the brevity of it. 

OYID. 

Ovid was the son of a Roman knight, had an 
easy fortune, and (to use a modern phrase) was 
one of the gayest and most popular men about 
town in Rome for nearly thirty years ; till, owing 
to some mysterious offense given to the court of 
Augustus, which forms one of the puzzles of biog- 
raphy, he was suddenly torn from house and home, 
without the least intimation, in the middle of the 
night, and sent to a remote and wintry place of 
exile on the banks of the Danube. Ovid was a 
good-natured man, tall and slender, with more 
affections than the levity of his poetical gallantry 
leads us to suppose. His gallantries are worth 
little, and have little effect ; but his " Metamor- 
phoses " are a store of beautiful Greek pictures, 
and tend to keep alive in grown people the feel- 
ings of their boyhood. 

THE YOIOE OF THE BOOK. 

The Saxon word rooh and the Latin word rau- 
ens (hoarse) appear to come from the same root ; 



36 TABLE-TALK. 

though it is curious that neither Latins nor Ital- 
ians have a name for the rook distinct from that 
of croTV or raven, as the English have. The same 
sense, however, of the hoarseness of the bird's 
voice seems to have furnished the names of al- 
most all the Corvican family — crow, rook, raven, 
daw^ corvus and comix (Latin), korax (Greek). 
When the rook is mentioned, nobody can help 
thinking of his voice. It is as much identified 
with him as bark with the old trees. But why do 
naturalists never mention the kindly chuckle of 
the young crows? particularly pleasant, good- 
humored, and infant-like ; as different from the 
rough note of the elders as peel is from bark, or 
a baby's voice is from that of a man. 

HOW LAWYERS GO TO HEAVEN. 

There is a pleasant story of a lawyer, who, 
being refused entrance into heaven by St. Peter, 
contrived to throw his hat inside the door ; and 
then, being permitted by the kind saint to go in 
and fetch it, took advantage of the latter's fixture 
as doorkeeper to refuse to come back again. 

COLLINS THE POET. 

In Mr. Pickering's edition of Collins there is 
an engraved likeness of the poet, the only one 
that has appeared. Nothing is said for its authen- 
ticity ; it is only stated to be " from a drawing 



COLLINS THE POET. 37 

formerly in the possession of William Seward, 
Esq." ; but it possesses, I tliink, internal evidence 
of its truth, being clouded, in the midst of its 
beauty, with a look of pride and passion. There 
is also a thick-stuffed look in the cheeks and about 
the eyes, as if he had been overfed ; no uncom- 
mon cause, however mean a one, of many a trouble 
in after-life. 

The dreadful calamity which befell the poet 
has generally been attributed to pecuniary dis- 
tresses occasioned by early negligence, or at least 
to habits of indolence and irresolution which grew 
upon him. His biographer, in this edition, says, 
with great appearance of justice, that the irreso- 
lution Avas always manifest ; and he attributes the 
calamity to a weakness of mind that was early 
developed. But whence arose the weakness of 
mind ? It is desirable, for the common interests 
of mankind, that biographers should trace char- 
acter and conduct to their first sources ; and it is 
little to say that a weakness was the consequence 
of a weakness. Collins's misfortune seems to have 
originated in the combined causes of delicacy of 
bodily organization, want of guidance on the part 
of relations, and perhaps in something of a ten- 
dency on their part to a similar malady. His 
father, a hatter, is described as being " a pompous 
man " ; his sister pushed avarice and resentment 
to a pitch of the insane ; the father died while 
his son was a boy, the mother not long afterward ; 



38 TABLE-TALK. 

his uncle, Colonel Martin, though otherwise very- 
kind, seems to have left him to his own guidance. 
The poet was so delicately organized, that in early- 
life he expected blindness ; and this ardent and 
sensitive young man, thus left to himself, con- 
scious of great natural powers, which he thought 
he might draw upon at a future day, and posses- 
sing the natural voluptuousness of the poetical 
temperament, plunged into debt and pleasure be- 
yond recovery, and thus, from a combination of 
predisposing circumstances, lost his wits. I think 
it discernible that he had his father's pride, though 
in better taste ; and also that he partook of his 
sister's vehemence, though as generous as she was 
stingy. We learn from Sir Egerton Brydges, 
that, notwithstanding his delicacy of tempera- 
ment, his shrieks were sometimes to be heard 
from the cloisters in Chichester to such an excess 
as to become unbearable. " Poor dear Collins ! " 
we involuntarily exclaim with Dr. Johnson : how 
much we owe, pity, and love him ! One can love 
any man that is generous ; one pities Collins in 
proportion as he has taught us to love Pity her- 
self ; and I for one owe him some of the most 
delightful dreams of my childhood. Of my child- 
hood, do I say? Of my manhood — of my eter- 
nityhood, I hope ; for his dreams are fit to be 
realized in the next world. 

" Thy form," says he, in his " Ode to Pity," 
speaking of the God of War — 



COLLINS THE POET. 39 

" Thy form from out thy sweet abode 
Overtook him on his blasted road, 
And stopped his wheels, and looked his rage away! " 

How did this passage, by the help of the pretty 
design by Mr. Kirk in Cooke's edition of the 
poets, affect me, and help to engage my heart for 
ever in the cause of humanity ! An allegory may 
be thought a cold thing by the critics ; but to a 
child it is often the best representation of the 
truth which he feels within him, and the man is 
so far fortunate who feels like the child. I used 
to fancy I saw Pity's house on the roadside — a 
better angel than those in Bunyan — and the sweet 
inmate issuing forth, on one of her dewy morn- 
ings, to look into the eyes of the God of War 
and turn him from his purpose. 

If Collins had married and had a family, or 
been compelled to write not only for himself but 
others, it is probable that the morbidity of his 
temperament would have been spared its fatal 
consequences : the necessity of labor might have 
varied his thoughts, and sympathy turned his 
very weakness into strength. A good heart can 
hardly be conscious of belonging to many others, 
and not distribute itself, as it were, into their 
being, and multiply its endurance for their sake. 
But Collins might have had such an opinion of 
his disease as to think himself bound to remain 
single. 

It does not appear that the greatest under- 



40 TABLE-TALK. 

standings, through whatever dangers they may 
pass from excess of thought, are liable to be 
finally borne down by it. They seize upon every 
help, and acquire the habit of conquest. But I 
suspect Collins to have been not only of a race 
overstocked with passion, but a spoiled child, 
habituated to the earliest indulgence of his feel- 
ings ; and the infirmity may have become so 
strong for him as to render such a piece of self- 
denial at once the most painful and most reason- 
able of his actions. One retires with reverence 
before the possibility of such a trial of virtue ; 
and can only end with hoping that the spirit 
which has given such delight to mankind is now 
itself delighted. 

A FACT. 

The powers of the printing-press are very ex- 
traordinary ; yet the imaginations even of the 
dull can outstrip them. A woman, I have been 
told, absolutely went into a bookseller's shop, said 
she was going farther, and requested to have a 
Bible which should be ^^ small in size, large in 
type, and printed by the time she came back." 
It was to a similar application that a bookseller 
replied : " I see what you want, madam ; a pint- 
pot that will hold a quart." More things of this 
kind have been related, probably with truth ; for 
there are as many strange truths of ignorance as 
of knowledge. 



CLERICAL TITLES. 41 

THE TWO COKQUEEOES. 

When Goethe says that in every human con- 
dition foes lie in wait for us, '^ vincible only by 
cheerfulness and equanimity," he does not mean 
that we can at all times be really cheerful, or at 
a moment's notice ; but that the endeavor to look 
at the better side of things will produce the habit; 
and that this habit is the surest safeguard against 
the danger of sudden evils. 

CLEEIOAL TITLES. 

It is a pity that the clergy do not give up the 
solemn trifling of some of their titles. Their titu- 
lar scales and gradations of merit become very 
ludicrous on inspection. Thus you may have a 
reverence for a curate of an apostolical life, sup- 
posing it possible to have it for a poor man ; but 
you can have no 7'ight reverence. A bishop is the 
only man who is " Right Reverend." The curate 
can not even be "Venerable," however he may 
be venerated : it is the archdeacon that is Vener- 
able. Again, a prebendary is not Most Reverend, 
though he is Very : the dean is the only man that 
is Most Reverend. There is a prevailing rever- 
ence in the prebendary : he is valde reve^^endus ; 
but the dean is filled and saturated and overflow- 
ing with venerability ; he is superlatively reverend 
— reverendissimus. These distinctions often take 



42 TABLE-TALK. 

place in the same man, in the course of a minute. 
An archdeacon for instance is dining, and has just 
swallowed his sixty-ninth mouthful ; during which 
operation he was only Venerable. A messenger 
comes in, and tells him that he is a dean ; upon 
which he spills the gravy for joy, and is Most 
Reverend. 

HORACE WALPOLE AND PINKERTOK 

Pinkerton was a man of an irritable and over- 
weening mediocrity. His correspondence with 
Beattie, Percy, and others, is curious for little 
more than the lamentable evidence it affords of 
the vfillingness of grave men to repay the flat- 
teries of a literary tyro, in a style which unques- 
tionably did Mr. Pinkerton great harm in after- 
life, and which is quite enough to account for the 
height of presumption to which it suffered his 
irritability to carrj^- him. Those of Horace Wal- 
pole, who contributed to the mischief, are the 
best. Like all the letters of that celebrated per- 
son, whose genius was a victim to his rank, they 
are remarkable for their singular union of fine 
sense, foppery, and insincerity. He praises Mr. 
Pinkerton desperately at first ; then gets tired 
of him, and mingles his praise with irony. Mr. 
Pinkerton finds out the irony, and complains of 
it ; upon which the man of quality has the impu- 
dence to vow he is serious, and proceeds to hoax 
him the more. 



HORACE WALPOLE AND PINKERTON. 43 

One of Mr. Pinkerton's fantastic contrivances 
to supply his want of originality was a specula- 
tion for improving the English tongue by the ad- 
dition of vowels to its final consonants. The num- 
ber of final s^s in our language is certainly a fault. 
It is a pity we do not retain the Saxon plural ter- 
mination in 671^ which we still have in the word 
oxen — as housen for houses, etc. But as changes 
for the worse grow out of circumstances, so must 
changes for the better ; especially upon points on 
which the world can feel themselves but feebly 
interested. What would the Stock Exchange 
care for consolso instead of consols ? or the poor 
for hreado, if they could but get hread? or even 
a lover, who has naturally a propensity to soft 
words, for a faira hrida, provided he has the 
lady? Yet upon improvements no wiser than 
these did Mr. Pinkerton and his correspondents 
busy themselves. One of them talks of quieto 
nyto, meaning a quiet night y and honesta shep- 
herda and shepherdeza ! 

Pinkerton sometimes encouraged Walpole him- 
self to get in a fantastic humor. Peter Pindar 

says : 

"My cousin Pindar in his odes 
Applauded horse-jockeys and gods." 

Walpole expressed a serious opinion that a new 
Pindar might do likewise — that all the English 
games might be rendered poetical like those of 
the ancients ; forgetting the differences of occa- 



44 TABLE-TALK. 

sion, custom, religion, and a totally different state 
of society. A serious panegyric on a gentleman's 
horse might undoubtedly be well received by the 
owner, and the poet invited to dinner to hear a 
delicious conversation on bets and chances ; but a 
ballad would do better than an ode. The latter 
Avould require translation into the vulgar tongue. 

JEWS. 

In our thoughts of old-clothesmen and de- 
spised shopkeepers, we are accustomed to forget 
that the Jews came from the East, and that they 
still partake in their blood of the vivacity of their 
Eastern origin. We forget that they have had 
their poets and philosophers, both gay and pro- 
found, and that the great Solomon was one of the 
most beautiful of amatory poets, of writers of 
epicurean elegance, and the delight of the whole 
Eastern world, who exalted him into a magician. 
There are plentiful evidences, indeed, of the vi- 
vacity of the Jewish character in the Bible. They 
were liable to very ferocious mistakes respecting 
their neighbors, but so have other nations been 
who have piqued themselves on their refinement ; 
but we are always reading of their feasting, danc- 
ing and singing, and harping and rejoicing. Half 
of David's imagery is made up of allusions to 
these lively manners of his countrymen. But the 
Bible has been read to us with such solemn faces, 



SMOLLETT. 45 

and associated with such false and gloomy ideas, 
that the Jews of old become as unpleasant though 
less undignified a multitude in our imaginations 
as the modern. We see as little of the real do- 
mestic interior of the one as of the other, even 
though no people have been more abundantly 
described to us. The moment we think of them 
as people of the East, this impression is changed, 
and we do them justice. Moses himself, who, 
notwithstanding his share of the barbarism above 
mentioned, was a genuine philosopher and great 
man, and is entitled to our eternal gratitude as 
the proclaimer of the Sabbath, is rescued from 
the degrading familiarity into which the word 
Moses has been trampled, when we read of him 
in D'Herbelot as Moussa ben Amran ; and even 
Solomon becomes another person as the Great 
Soliman or Soliman ben Daoud, who had the ring 
that commanded the genii, and sat with twelve 
thousand seats of gold on each side of him, for 
his sages and great men. 

SMOLLETT. 

Though Smollett sometimes vexes us with the 
malicious boy's-play of his heroes, and sometimes 
disgusts with his coarseness, he is still the Smol- 
lett whom now, as in one's boyhood, it is impos- 
sible not to heartily laugh with. He is an accom- 
plished writer, and a mastei'ly observer, and may 



46 TABLE-TALK. 

be called the finest of caricaturists. His carica- 
tures are always substantially true : it is only 
the complexional vehemence of his gusto that 
leads him to toss them up as he does, and tumble 
them on our plates. Then as to the objections 
against his morality, nobody will be hurt by it. 
The delicate and sentimental will look on the 
whole matter as a joke ; the accessories of the 
characters will deter them: while readers of a 
coarser taste, for whom their friends might fear 
most, because they are most likely to be conver- 
sant with the scenes described, are, in our opinion, 
to be seriously benefited by the perusal ; for it 
will show them that heroes of their description 
are expected to have virtues as well as faults, and 
that they seldom get anything by being positively 
disagreeable or bad. Our author's lovers, it must 
be owned, are not of the most sentimental or flat- 
tering description. One of their common modes 
of paying their court, even to those they best 
love and esteem, is by writing lampoons on other 
women ! Smollett had a strong spice of pride 
-and malice in him (greatly owing, we doubt not, 
to some scenes of unjust treatment he witnessed 
in early youth), which he imparts to his heroes ; 
all of whom, probably, are caricatures of himself, 
as Fielding's brawny, good-natured, idle fellows 
are of him. There is no serious evil intention, 
however. It is all out of resentment of some evil, 
real or imaginary ; or is made up of pure animal 



CHEMISTRY. 47 

spirit and the love of venting a complexional sense 
of power. It is energy, humor, and movement, 
not particularly amiable, but clever, entertaining, 
and interesting, and without an atom of hypocrisy 
in it. No man will learn to be shabby by reading 
Smollett's writings. 

CHEMISTRY. 

We eat, drink, sleep, and are clothed in things 
chemical ; the eye that looks at us contains them ; 
the lip that smiles at the remark is colored by 
them; v/e shed tears {horrihile cUctu!) of soda- 
water. But we need not be humiliated. Roses 
and dew-drops contain the same particles as we ; 
custom can not take away the precious mystery 
of the elements ; the meanest compounds contain 
secrets as dignified as the most lofty. The soul 
remains in the midst of all, a wondrous magician, 
turning them to profit and beauty. 

A good book about chemistry is as entertain- 
ing as a romance. Indeed, a great deal of ro- 
mance, in every sense of the term, has always 
been mixed up with chemistry. This most useful 
of the sciences arose out of the vainest ; at least 
the art of making gold, or the secret of the phi- 
losopher's stone (for chemistry originally meant 
nothing more), has hitherto had nothing to show 
for itself but quackery and delusion. What dis- 
coveries the human mind may arrive at, it is im- 



48 TABLE-TALK. 

possible to say. I am not for putting bounds to 
its possibilities, or saying that no Columbuses are 
to arise in the intellectual world, who shall as far 
surpass the other as the universe does our hemi- 
sphere. But meanwhile chemistry supplied us 
with food for romances before it took to regulat- 
ing that of the stomach, or assisting us in the 
conquest of the world material. We owe to it 
the classification and familiar intimacy of the 
Platonical world of spirits, the Alchemists of 
Chaucer and Ben Jonson, partly even of the 
"Rape of the Lock." Paracelsus's Daemon of 
the stomach was the first that brought the spirit- 
ual and medical world into contact : in other 
words, we owe to that extraordinary person, who 
was an instance of the freaks played by a great 
understanding when it is destitute of moral sensi- 
bility, the first application of chemical knowledge 
to medicine. The amiable and delightful CuUen, 
in whom an extreme humanity became a profound 
wisdom (and the world are still to be indebted to 
him in morals as well as physics), was the first 
who enlarged the science into the universal thing 
which it is now. This was not a hundred years 
ago. To what a size has it not grown since, like 
the vapory giant let out of the casket ! 



PETTY CONVENIENCES AND COMFORTS. 49 

PETTY OONVENIE]!TOES AND OOMFOKTS. 

The locks and keys, and articles on a par with 
them, in Tuscany, are, perhaps, the same now that 
they were in the days of Lorenzo de' Medici. The 
more cheerful a nation is in ordinary, or the hap- 
pier its climate, the less it cares for those petty 
conveniences which irritable people keep about 
them, as a set-off to their want of happiness in the 
lump. A Roman or a Tuscan will be glad enough 
to make use of an English razor when he gets it ; 
but the point is, that he can do better without it 
than the Englishman. We have sometimes seen 
in the face of an Italian, when English penknives 
and other perfections of manufacture have been 
shown him, an expression, mixed with his wonder, 
of something like paternal pity, as if the excess 
of the thing was childish. It seemed to say : " Ah, 
you can make those sort of things, and we can do 
without them. Can you make such knicknacks 
as Benvenuto Cellini did — carcanets and caskets, 
full of exquisite sculpture, and worth their weight 
in jewels ? " 

And there is reason in this. It is convenient 
to have the most exquisite penknives ; but it is a 
greater blessing to be able to do without them. 
No reasonable man would stop the progress of 
manufacture, for a good will come of it beyond 
what was contemplated. But it is not to be de- 
nied, meanwhile, that the more petty conveniences 
4 



60 TABLE-TALK. 

we abound in, the more we become the slaves of 
them, and the more impatient at wanting them 
where they are not. Not having the end, we keep 
about us what we take for the means. Cultivators 
of better tempers or happier soils get at the end 
by shorter cuts. The only real good of the ex- 
cessive attention we pay to the conveniences of 
life is, that the diffusion of knowledge and the 
desire of advancement proceed in company with 
it ; and that happier nations may ultimately be- 
come still happier by our discoveries, and improve 
us, in their turn, by those of their livelier nature. 

TEARS. 

Sympathizing and selfish people are alike given 
to tears, if the latter are selfish on the side of 
personal indulgence*. The selfish get their senses 
into a state to be moved by any kind of excite- 
ment that stimulates their languor, and take a 
wonderful degree of pity on themselves ; for such 
is the secret of their pretended pity for others. 
You may always know it by the fine things they 
say of their own sufferings on the occasion. Sen- 
sitive people, on the other hand, of a more gener- 
ous sort, though they can not always restrain their 
tears, are accustomed to do so, partly out of shame 
at being taken for the others, partly because they 
can less afford the emotion. The sensitive selfish 
have the advantage in point of natural strength, 



DR. ALDRICH. 51 

being often as fat, jolly people as any, with a 
trick of longevity. George IV., with all his tears, 
and the wear and tear of his dinners to boot, last- 
ed to a reasonable old age. If he had been shrewd- 
er, and taken more care of himself, he might have 
lived to a hundred. But it must be allowed that 
he would then have been still more selfish than he 
was ; for these luxurious weepers are at least gen- 
erous in imagination. They include a notion of 
other people somehow, and are more convertible 
into good people when young. The most selfish 
person we ever met with was upward of a hun- 
dred, and had the glorious reputation of not being 
movable by anything or anybody. He lasted as 
a statue might last in a public square, which would 
see the whole side of it burn with moveless eyes 
and bowels of granite." 

DE. ALDRICH. 

Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, built some 
well-known and admired structures at Oxford ; 
was a musician as well as architect ; wrote the 
famous "Smoking Catch" (being accomplished in 
the smoking art also) ; was the author of " Hark ! 
the Bonny Christ Church Bells," a composition of 
great sprightliness and originality ; and has the 
reputation of being an elegant Latin poet. His 
Latin verses are to be met with in the "Musse 
Anglicanse " ; but we do not remember them, un- 



52 TABLE-TALK. 

less the following hexameters be among the num- 
ber : 

^' Si bene quid memini, causae sunt quinque bibendi: 
Hospitis adventus, prsasens sitis, atque futura, 
Aut vini bonitas, aut qu^libet altera causa." 

Which has been thus translated, perhaps by the 
author, for the version is on a par with the origi- 
nal : 

^^If on my theme I rightly think, 
There are five reasons why men drink : 
Good wine, a friend, or being dry, 
Or lest we should be by-and-by, 
Or any other reason why." 



LOKD MARCHMONT'S EEOEIPT FOR LON^GEV- 
ITY. 

Lord Marchmont, the friend of Pope, lived to 
the age of eighty-six, preserving his strength and 
faculties to the last. He rode out only five days 
before he died. Sir John Sinclair, who knew him, 
wished to ascertain the system he pursued, and 
received for answer that his lordship always lived 
as other people did, but that he had laid down 
when young one maxim, to which he rigidly ad- 
hered, and to which he attributed much of his 
good health, namely : 

Now, what do you think this maxim was ? 
Never to exceed in his eating? No. Never to 
lie late in bed ? No. Never to ne^^lect exercise ? 



LORD MARCHMONT'S RECEIPT FOR LONGEVITY. 53 

Never to take much physic ? Never to he rakish, 
to be litigious, to be ill-tempered, to give way to 
passion ? ISTo, none of these. It was 

N'e'cer to mix Ms wines. 

What luxurious philosophies some people have ! 
My Lord Marchmont was resolved to be a long- 
lived, virtuous, venerable man ; and therefore he 
laid it down as a maxim, Never to mix his wines. 
To get one glass of wine, in their extreme weak- 
ness, is what some human beings, bent double 
with age, toil, and rheumatism, can seldom hope 
for ; while another of the race, having nothing to 
bend him and nothing to do, shall become a glo- 
rious example of the beauty of this apostolical 
maxim — " Never to mix your whines." Lord 
Marchmont did accordingly for many years gen- 
erously restrict himself to the use of claret ; but 
his physicians having forbidden him to take that 
wine on account of its acidity, he resolved, with 
equal self-denial, to " confine himself to Burgun- 
dy " ; and accordingly, with a perseverance that 
can not be sufiiciently commended, he "took a 
bottle of it every day for fifteen years." 

The noble lord was a good man, however, and 
his "neat, as imported," is not to be grudged 
him. All we have to lament is, that thousands, 
as good as he, have not an atom either of his 
pleasure or his leisure. 



54 TABLE-TALK. 

THE AMERICAIsr EEYOLUTIOK 

There is something in the history of the 
American Revolution extremely dry and unat- 
tractive. This is owing partly perhaps to the 
moneyed origin of it, partly to the want of per- 
sonal anecdotes, to the absence of those interest- 
ing local and historical associations which abound 
in older states, and to the character of Washing- 
ton ; who, however admirable a person, and fitted 
as if by Providence to the task which he effected, 
was himself, personally, of a dry and unattractive 
nature, an impersonation of integrity and straight- 
forwardness, exhibiting none of the social or ro- 
mantic qualities which interest us in other great 
men. For similar reasons, the American Indians 
are the least interesting of savages. Their main 
object has been to exhibit themselves in an apa- 
thetic or stoical character, and they have suffered 
in human sympathy accordingly. 

DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA. 

It is painful to reflect on the calamitous cir- 
cumstances under which these high-minded ad- 
venturers were accustomed to terminate their 
careers, however brilliant their successes by the 
way. They got riches and territory for others, 
and generally died in poverty, often of wounds 
and disease, sometimes by the hands of the execu- 



DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA. 55 

tioner. Pinzon, who first crossed the equinoctial 
line in the New Hemisphere and discovered Bra- 
zil, got nothing by his voyage of discovery but 
heavy losses. Nicuesa disappeared, and was sup- 
posed to have perished at sea. Valdivia was 
killed and eaten by cannibals. Ponce de Leon, 
who thought to discover the fountain of youth, 
died of a wound exasperated by mortified pride 
and disappointment. The lofty and romantic Don 
Alonzo de Ojeda died so poor that he did not 
leave money enough to provide for his interment ; 
and so broken in spirit that with his last breath 
he entreated that his body might be buried in the 
monastery of San Francisco, just at the portal, in 
humble expiation of his past pride, that " every 
one who entered might tread upon his grave." 
And Vasco Nunez de Balboa, one of the best of 
the old brotherhood, perished on the scaffold, a 
victim, like Columbus, to envy. It is to be recol- 
lected, however, that such men accomplish the 
first object of their amibition — renown ; and that 
life, and not death, is the main thing by which 
we are to judge of their happiness. 

WONDER KEYEE CEASES. 

It might be thought that the progress of sci- 
ence would destroy the pleasure arising from the 
perusal of works of fiction, by showing us the me- 
chanical causes of phenomena, and so leading us 



56 TABLE-TALK. 

to conclude that the utmost wonders we could im- 
agine might with equal reason be referred to simi- 
lar causes. In other words, no wonder is greater 
than any other wonder ; and, if once explained, it 
ceases to be a wonder. " Wonder," it has been 
said, "is the effect of novelty upon ignorance." 
Perhaps it would have been said better, that won- 
der is the effect of want of familiarity upon ig- 
norance : for there are many things that excite 
our wonder, though far from new to us or to our 
reflections ; such as life and death, the phenome- 
na of the planets, etc. But to say nothing of the 
inexhaustible stock of novelties, wonders could 
never cease in anything till we knew their first as 
well as their final causes. We must understand 
how it is that substance, and motion, and thought 
exist, before we can cease to admire them : the 
very power of writing a fauy tale is as great a 
wonder as anything it relates. And thus, while 
we think to frighten away the charms of fable 
and poetry with the sound of our shuttles and 
steam-engines, they only return the more near to 
us, settle smiling on the very machinery, and (to 
say nothing of other sympathies) demand admira- 
tion on the very same grounds. 

DALY, THE DUBLIN MANAGER. 

Daly, patentee of the Dublin Theatre, was 
one of those iron-hearted and brazen-faced black- 



DALY, THE DUBLIN MANAGER. 57 

guards, who, in an age when knowledge is on the 
increase, are not so likely to be taken for clever 
fellows as they used to be ; being in fact no other 
than scoundrels in search of a sensation, and will- 
ing to gratify it, like wild beasts, at the risk of 
any price to the sufferer. Such fellows do not 
abound with courage : they merely have one of 
an honorable man's drawbacks upon ferocity. To 
talk of their other gallantry w^ould be equally pre- 
posterous. Even of animal impulse they know 
no more than others. They only know no re- 
straint. Give a man good health, and take from 
him all reflection and every spark of love, and 
you have the human wild beast called Daly. His 
best excuse was his squint. There was some smack 
of salvation in that, for it looks as if he resented 
it. 

" Richard Daly, Esq., patentee of the Dublin 
Theatre " (says Boaden's " Life of Mrs. Jordan "), 
" was born in the county of Galway, and educated 
at Trinity College. As a preparation for the 
course he intended to run through life, he had 
fought sixteen duels in two years, three with the 
small-sword and thirteen with pistols ; and he, I 
suppose, imagined, like Macbeth, with equal con- 
fidence and more truth, that he bore a ' charmed 
life ' ; for he had gone through the said sixteen 
trials of his nerve without a single wound or 
scratch of much consequence. He, therefore, 
used to provoke such meetings on any usual and 



58 TABLE-TALK. 

even uncertain grounds, and entered the field in 
pea-green, embroidered and ruffled and curled, as 
if he had been to hold up a very different ball, 
and gallantly presented his full front, conspicuous- 
ly finished with an elegant brooch, quite regard- 
less how soon the labors of the toilet ' might soil 
their honors in the dust.' Daly, in person, was 
remarkably handsome, and his features would 
have been agreeable but for an inveterate and 
most distressing squint, the consciousness of which 
might keep his courage eternally upon the look- 
out for provocation, and not seldom, from sur- 
prise alone, afford him an opportunity for this his 
favorite diversion. Like Wilkes, he must have 
been a very unwelcome adversary to meet with 
the sword, because the eye told the opposite party 
none of his intentions. Mr. Daly's gallantry was 
equal at least to his courage, and the latter was 
often necessary to defend him in the unbridled 
indulgence that through life he permitted to the 
former. He was said to be the general lover in 
his theatrical company ; and, I presume, the re- 
sistance of the fair to a manager may be some- 
what modified by the danger of offending one 
who has the power to appoint them to parts, 
either striking or otherwise, and who must not 
be irritated if he can not be obliged. It has been 
said, too, that any of his subjects risked a great 
deal by an escape from either his love or his tyr- 
anny ; for he would put his bond in force upon 



LIGHT AND COLORS. 59 

the refractory, and condemn to a hopeless impris- 
onment those who, from virtue or disgust, had 
determined to disappoint him." 

LIGHT AND COLOKS. 

Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all 
visible things ; that is to say, it has the least anal- 
ogy to other bodies, and is the least subject to 
secondary explanations. No object of sight equals 
it in tenuity, in velocity, in beauty, in remoteness 
of origin, and closeness of approach. It has " no 
respect of persons." Its beneficence is most im- 
partial. It shines equally on the jewels of an 
Eastern prince and on the dust in the corner of 
a warehouse. Its delicacy, its power, its utility, 
its universality, its lovely essence, visible and yet 
intangible, make up something godlike to our im- 
aginations; and, though we acknowledge divinities 
more divine, we feel that ignorant as well as wise 
fault may be found with those who have made it 
an object of worship. 

One of the most curious things with regard to 
light is, that it is a body, by means of which we 
become sensible of the existence of other bodies. 
It is a substance ; it exists as much in the space 
between our eyes and the object it makes known 
to us as it does in any other instance ; and yet 
we are made sensible of that object by means of 
the very substance intervening. When our in- 



60 TABLE-TALK. 

quiries are stopped by perplexities of this kind, 
no wonder that some awe-stricken philosophers 
have thought further inquiry forbidden ; and that 
others have concluded, with Berkeley, that there 
is no such thing as substance but in idea, and that 
the phenomena of creation exist but by the will 
of the Great Mind, which permits certain apparent 
causes and solutions to take place, and to act in 
a uniform manner. Milton doubts whether he 
ought to say what he felt concerning light : 

''Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven first-born, 
Or of the eternal coeternal beam, 
May I express thee unblamed? since God is light, 
And never but in an unapproached light 
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt there in thee. 
Bright effluence of bright essence increate." 

And then he makes that pathetic complaint, dur- 
ing which we imagine him sitting with his blind 
eyes in the sun, feeling its warmth upon their 
lids, while he could see nothing : 

"... Thee I revisit safe, 
And feel thy sovran vital lamp ; but thou 
Eevisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain 
To find tby piercing ray, and find no dawn.'' 

As color is imparted solely by the different 
rays of light with which they are acted upon, 
the sun literally paints the flowers. The hues of 
the pink and rose literally come, every day, direct 
from heaven. 



VERSIONS OF ANCIENT LYRICS. 61 

YEESIOlSrS OF ANCIENT LYRICS. 

The more we consider Anacreon and the an- 
cient lyrics, the more probable it seems that some 
degree of paraphrase is necessary, to assimilate 
them in effect to the original. We are to recol- 
lect that the ancient odes were written to be sung 
to music ; that the poet himself was the first per- 
former ; and that the idea of words and music 
was probably never divided in the mind of the 
reader. The spirit of enjoyment is a spirit of 
continuousness. We may suppose what we like 
of Greek simplicity and brevity, especially in their 
epigrams or inscriptions, the shortness of which 
was most likely prescribed, in the first instance, 
by the nature of the places on which they were 
written ; but we may be pretty certain that the 
shortest of Anacreon's songs was made three, or 
four, or five times as long as it appears to us, by 
the music with which it was accompanied. Take 
a song of Metastasio's, as set by Arne or Mozart, 
and we shall find the duration of it a very differ- 
ent thing in the study and the theatre. The only 
true way, therefore, of translating an ode of Anac- 
reon, is to sympathize as much as possible with 
his animal spirits, and then to let the words flow 
as freely as they will, with as musical and danc- 
ing a melody as possible, so as to make the flow 
and continuity of the verse as great a substitute 
as possible for the accompaniment of the lyre. 



62 TABLE-TALK. 

The only versions of Anacreon in the English 
language that are really worth anything, are 
those of Cowley ; and these are as paraphrastic 
as they are joyous. 



CATHAEINE IL OF EUSSIA. 

As long as she had everything her own way, 
Catharine could be a very pleasant, vain, de- 
bauched, fat-growing, all-tolerant mistress, inter- 
changing little homages with the philosophers ; 
but as soon as philosophy threatened to regard the 
human race as of more consequence than one wo- 
man, adieu to flattery and to France. The French 
then were only worthy of being " drubbed." 

Catharine was a clever German^ with a great 
deal of will, among a nation of barbarians. This 
is the clew to her ascendancy. In a more south- 
ern country she would probably have been little 
thought of, in comparison with what she was 
reputed as the " mother " of her great clownish 
family of Russians. 

Note. — That the arbitrary have always had a 
tendency to grow fat, for the same reason that 
inclines them to be furious. The same people 
who can deny others everything are famous for 
refusing themselves nothing. 



PETRARCH AND LAURA. 63 

PETRARCH AND LAURA. 

There is plenty of evidence in her lover's 
poetry to show that Laura portioned out the 
shade and sunshine of her countenance in a man- 
ner that had the instinctive effect of artifice, 
though we do not believe there was any intention 
to practice it. And this is a reasonable conclu- 
sion, warranted by the experience of the world. 
It is not necessary to suppose Laura a perfect 
character, in order to excite the love of so ima- 
ginative a heart as Petrarch's. A good half or 
two thirds of the love may have been assignable 
to the imagination. Part of it was avowedly at- 
tributable to the extraordinary fidelity with which 
she kept her marriage vow to a disagreeable hus- 
band, in a city so licentious as Avignon, and, 
therefore, partook of that not very complimenta- 
ry astonishment and that willingness to be at an 
unusual disadvantage, which make chastity cut so 
remarkable a figure amid the rakeries of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher. Furthermore, Laura may not 
have understood the etherealities of Petrarch. It 
is possible that less homage might have had a 
greater effect upon her ; and it is highly probable 
(as Petrarch, though he speaks well of her natural 
talents, says she had not been well educated) that 
she had that instinctive misgiving of the fine 
qualities attributed to her, which is produced even 
in the vainest of women by flights to which they 



64 TABLE-TALK. 

are unaccustomed. It makes them resent tlieir 
incompetency upon the lover who thus strangely 
reminds them of it. Most women, however, would 
naturally be unwilling to lose such an admirer, 
especially as they found the admiration of him 
extend in the world ; and Laura is described by 
her lover as manifestly affected by it. Upon the 
whole, I should guess her to have been a very 
beautiful, well-meaning woman, far from insensi- 
ble to public homage of any sort (she was a splen- 
did dresser, for instance), and neither so wise nor 
so foolish as to make her seriously responsible for 
any little coquetries she practiced, or wanting in 
sufficient address to practice them well. Her his- 
tory is a lofty comment upon the line in '' The 
Beggars' Opera " — 

'' By keeping men off, you keep them on." 

As to the sonnets with which this great man 
immortalized his love, and which are full of the 
most wonderful beauties, small and great (the ver- 
sification being surprisingly various and charming, 
and the conceits of which they have been accused 
being for the most part as natural and delightful 
as anything in them, from a propensity v/hich a 
real lover has to associate his mistress with every- 
thing he sees), justice has been done to their gen- 
tler beauties, but not, I think, to their intensity 
and passion. Romeo should have written a criti- 
cism on Petrarch's sonnets. He would have done 



MORAL AND PERSONAL COURAGE. 65 

justice both to their " conceits " and their fervor. 
I think it is Ugo Foscolo who remarks that Pe- 
trarch has given evidence of passion felt in soli- 
tude, amounting even to the terrible. His tem- 
perament partook of that morbid cast which makes 
people haunted by their ideas, and which, in men 
of genius, subjects them sometimes to a kind of 
delirium of feelings without destroying the truth 
of their perceptions. Petrarch more than once 
represents himself in these sonnets as struggling 
with a propensity to suicide ; nor do we know , 
anything more affecting in the record of a man's 
struggles with unhappiness than the one contain- 
ing a prayer of humiliation to God on account of 
his passion, beginning 

" Padre del ciel, dopo i perduti giorni " — 
(Father of heaven, after the lost days). 

The commentators tell us that it was written 
on a Good Friday, exactly eleven years from the 
commencement of his love. 



MORAL AND PERSONAL COURAGE. 

In all moral courage there is a degree of per- 
sonal ; personal is sometimes totally deficient in 
moral. The reason is, that moral courage is a 
result of the intellectual perceptions and of con- 
science ; whereas a man totally deficient in those 
may have nerves or gall enough to face any dan- 
5 



66 TABLE-TALK. 

ger whicli his body feels itself competent to op- 
pose. When the physically courageous man comes 
into the region of mind and speculation, or when 
the question is purely one of right or wrong, he is 
apt to feel himself in the condition of the sailor 
who confessed that he was afraid of ghosts, be- 
cause he " did not understand their tackle." When 
moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is 
no personal daring of which it is incapable. 

TIGHT-LAOIIsra. 

It is a frequent matter of astonishment why 
females should persist in tight-lacing when so 
much is said against it, and how it happens that 
they should take what is really a deformity for 
something handsome. The first part of this mys- 
tery is answered by the second : they think the 
waist produced by tight-lacing a beauty ; and the 
reason why they think so is, that they know a 
small waist to be the object of admiration, and 
they feel that they can never persuade you it is 
small without forcing the smallness upon your 
eyes, and thus forcing you to acknowledge it. 
On the contrary, the spectator feels that, if the 
waist were really small, so much pains would not 
be taken to convince him of it. But this the poor 
creatures will not consider. Every one thinks 
that there will be an exception in her favor. 
Other women, she allows, make themselves ridic- 



TIGHT-LACING. 67 

ulous, and attempt to impose upon us ; witli her- 
self the case is different : everybody must see 
that her waist is really small. Therefore she goes 
lacing and lacing on, till she becomes like a wasp ; 
and everybody who follows her in the street laughs 
at her. 

Some of these waists are of such frightful 
tenuity as to strike the least thinking observer 
with their ugliness. The other day there was a 
young lady walking before me in the street, whose 
waist literally seemed no thicker than a large arm. 
The poor girl had marked herself for death. 
Some of the most vital parts of her body must 
have been fairly lapped over one another, or 
squeezed into a mass. My first sensation, on see- 
ing this phenomenon, was horror at the monstrosi- 
ty ; the second was vexation with the poor silly 
girl ; the third was pity. The ground of the 
stupid custom is sympathy, however mistaken. 
The poor simpletons wish for our admiration, and 
do not know how hard they try to gain our con- 
tempt. We ought to be the less provoked, be- 
cause in all these yearnings after social approba- 
tion there is the germ of a great preferment for 
the community ; since the same people who now 
make themselves so ridiculous, and get so much 
death and disease, by pursuing false means of ob- 
taining our good opinion, would, in a v/iser state 
of society, be led as vehemently to adopt the true. 
Instead of going about half stifled with bad vitals 



68 TABLE-TALK. 

and ready-made coroner's inquests, the poor crea- 
tures would then be anxious to show us that thqy 
were natural healthy females, fit to be wives and 
mothers. At present, if they can be mothers at 
all, it is frightful to think what miseries they may 
inflict on their offspring. 

GRAVITY AND INDUSTRY OF DANCERS. 

One of Addison's happy papers in the " Spec- 
tator " (and how numerous they are !) contains an 
account of a mysterious personage who, lodging 
at the same house as his observer and making a 
great noise one day over his head, was watched 
by some of his fellow lodgers through the key- 
hole. They observed him look gravely on a book, 
and then twirl round upon one leg. He looked 
gravely again, and put forth his leg in a different 
manner. A third time he fell to studying pro- 
foundly, and then, darting off with vivacity, took 
a career round the room. The conclusion was, if 
I remember, that he was some mad gentleman. 
The peepers, however, ventured in, and upon in- 
quiry found that he was a dancing-master. The 
Spectator, who had joined them, concluded by re- 
questing that the gentleman would be pleased in 
future to addict himself with less vehemence to 
his studies, since they had cost him that morning 
the loss of several trains of thought, besides 
breaking a couple of tobacco-pipes. 



GRAVITY AND INDUSTRY OF DANCERS. 69 

They who have seen the grave faces and lively- 
legs of some of the opera-dancers, can easily un- 
derstand the profundities of this master of their 
art ; nor will they fall into the mistake of young 
people in supposing that a dancer has nothing to 
do but to be lively and enjoy himself. M. Blasis, 
the author of a work on the art, says that the 
dancer must be always practicing, otherwise he is 
in danger of losing what he has acquired. Some 
muscle will get out of practice, some shiver of the 
left leg be short of perfection. Furthermore, he 
must follow neither " simple unpracticed theo- 
rists," nor the '^ imaginary schemes of innovat- 
ing speculators." He must also be temperate 
and sober ; nay, must " partially renounce every 
pleasure but that which Terpsichore affords " ; 
must not think of horsemanship, fencing, or run- 
ning ; must study the antique, drawing, and mu- 
sic, but particularly his own limbs ; and, if he 
aspire to the composition of ballets, must have a 
profound knowledge of the drama and of human 
nature. See now, you who reflect but little, how 
much it takes to bring a man to a right state of 
pirouette ; what world of accomplishment there 
is in that little toe, which seems pointed at no- 
thing ; and what a right the possessor of it has to 
the grave face which has so often puzzled conjec- 
ture. He seems to be merely holding the tip of a 
lady's finger ; but who is to know what is passing 
through his mind ? 



70 TABLE-TALK. 

" Use your endeavors," saith Blasis, " to twirl 
delicately round on the points of your toes." 
Here we feel in a state of anxiety, with a world 
of labor before us. In another sentence, one 
hardly knows in what sense we are to take his 
words — whether as an encouragement to tranquil- 
lity of mind, or an injunction to acquire lissom- 
ness in the body. " Make yourself easy," quoth 
he, " about your hips," 

ADVERTISEMENTS. 

Advertisements are sometimes very amusing. 
They give insights into the manners of the times 
no less interesting than authentic. Suppose the 
ancients had possessed a press, and that a volume 
of a Roman " Post " or " Chronicle " had been 
dug up at Herculaneum, with what curiosity 
should we not contemplate the millinery of the 
Roman ladies, or, " Wanted, a Gladiator to fight 
the last new lion " ; or, " Next Ides of November 
will be published the new poem of Quintus Hora- 
tius Flaccus " ; or a long account of a court-day 
of Nero or Antoninus ! The best editions of the 
"Tatler" and " Spectator " have very properly re- 
tained a selection of the Advertisements. 

SPORTSMEN AND CUSTOM. 

There are unquestionably many amiable men 
among sportsmen, who, as the phrase is, would 



BEARS AND THEIR HUNTERS. 71 

not " hurt a fly " — that is to say, on a window. 
At the end of a string, the case is altered. So 
marvelous are the effects of custom and educa- 
tion. Consoling thought, nevertheless ! for if 
custom and education have been so marvelous in 
reconciling intelligent men to absurdities, and 
humane men to cruelty, what will they not effect 
when they shall be on the side of justice ? when 
reason, humanity, and enjoyment shall become 
the three new graces of the civilized world ? It 
has been said that absurdities are necessary to 
man ; but nobody thinks so who is not their 
victim. With occupation, leisure, and healthy 
amusement, all the world would be satisfied. 

BEARS AND THEIR HUNTERS. 

It is natural in bear-hunters, who have wit- 
nessed the creature's ravages, and felt the peril of 
his approach, to call him a ferocious animal, and 
gift him at times with other epithets of objec- 
tion ; but we who sit in our closets, far removed 
from the danger, may be allowed to vindicate the 
character of the bear, and to think that Bruin, 
who is only laboring in his vocation, and is not 
more ferocious than hunger and necessity make 
him, might, with at least equal reason, have ad- 
vanced some objections against his invader. He 
might have said, if he possessed a little ^sopean 
knowledge of mankind : " Here, now, is a fellow 



72 TABLE-TALK. 

coming to kill me for getting my dinner, who 
eats slaughtered sheep and lobsters boiled alive ; 
who, with the word ' ferocity ' in his mouth, puts 
a ball into my poor head, just as the highwayman 
vindicates himself by abusing the man he shoots ; 
and who then writes an account of his humane 
achievement with a quill plucked from the body 
of a bleeding and screaming goose." 

Or, knowing nothing of mankind, he might 
say : " Here comes that horrid strange animal to 
murder us, who sometimes has one sort of head 
and sometimes another (hat and cap), and who 
carries another terrible animal in his paw — a 
kind of stiff snake — which sends out thunder 
and lightning ; and so he points his snake at 
us, and in an instant we are filled with burning 
wounds, and die in agonies of horror and desper- 
ation." 

There is much resemblance to humanity in 
the bear. I would not make invidious compari- 
sons ; but travelers as well as poets have given 
us beautiful accounts of the maternal affections 
of the bear. And furthermore, the animal re- 
sembles many respectable gentlemen whom we 
could name. When he wishes to attack anybody, 
he rises on his hind legs, as men do in the House 
of Commons ; he dances, as aldermen do, with 
great solemnity and weight ; and his general ap- 
pearance, when you see him walking about the 
streets with his keeper, is surely like that of many 



SELF-STULTIFICATION. 73 

a gentleman in a great-coat, whose enormity of 
appetite and the recklessness with which he in- 
dulges in it entitle him to have a keeper also. 

SELF-STULTIFICxiTIOIsr. 

The highest, most deliberate, peremptory, and 
solemn instance perhaps on record of this species 
of absurdity, is the dismissal of his court-fool, 
Archibald Armstrong, by Charles I. in council. 
Archy, as he was called, had given mortal offense 
to Laud by ridiculing his attempts at church- 
domination. It is related of him that he once 
said, by way of grace before dinner, " Great 
praise to the King, and Little Laud to the devil." 
But the last feather that broke the back of the 
Archbishop's patience was Archibald saying to 
him, on the failure of his liturgy in Scotland, 
" Who's fool now ? " Laud complained to 
Charles ; Charles summoned his council to take 
cognizance of the dreadful matter ; and accord- 
ingly, at " Whitehall, on the eleventh of March, • 
one thousand six hundred and thirty-seven, pres- 
ent the King's Most Excellent Majesty, the Lord 
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Keeper, 
Lord Treasurer, Lord Privy Seal," and fourteen 
other great personages, Archibald Armstrong, 
"the King's fool," for certain scandalous words, 
of a " high nature," and " proved to be uttered 
by him by two witnesses," was sentenced to have 



74 TABLE-TALK. 

" his coat pulled over his ears/' and discharged 
from his Majesty's service. 

What was this but saying that the fool was a 
fool no longer ? " Write me down an ass," says 
Dogberry in the comedy. Write down that 
Archy is no fool, says King Charles in council ; 
he has called the Archbishop one ; and therefore 
we are all agreed, the Archbishop included, that 
the man has proved himself to be entitled no 
longer to the appellation. 

COWSLIPS. 

A country-girl the other day expressed her 
astonishment that ladies could see anything to 
admii^e in " cowslips." Now, here was an instance 
of the familiarity that breeds contempt. Cow- 
slips are among the most elegant of the spring 
flowers. They look, with those pretty sleeves of 
theirs, like ladies themselves in their morning 
dresses. But the country-girl had been accus- 
tomed to see whole fields of them, and to associate 
them with wet and mire, and Farmer Higgins. 

Shakespeare mentions cowslips seven times, 
primroses just as often, and violets fourteen. He 
says nothing of anemones or hyacinths. I gather 
this from Mrs. Clarke's " Concordance," which, 
besides being admirably what it professes to be, 
suggests curious speculations as to the greater or 
less likings of Shakespeare, his habitual associa- 



APRIL FOOLS. 75 

tions of ideas, etc. ; and it might be made subser- 
vient to interesting inquiries on those subjects. 



APKIL FOOLS. 

An anniversary of this kind, in which stultifi- 
cation is the order of the day, appears to take 
place about the same time of the year all over the 
civilized world. Yet it would look more like a 
custom originating in some one particular coun- 
try than most of those which are thought to have 
had such commencements ; for it is as difficult 
not to imagine ordinary holidays and supersti- 
tions the natural growth of every human com- 
munity as it would be to suppose that all the 
world, at one particular season, agreed to make 
fools of one another without knowing it. 

There are solemn people whose dignity can 
not bear to be disturbed, let the season be never 
so full of gayety. It is such a fragile and empty 
pretension, they are afraid that the least touch 
will knock it to pieces. Not so with the wiser. 
They rejoice in every good which Nature has be- 
stowed on them, mirth included ; and are only 
balked by the presence of the incompetent. The 
celebrated Dr. Clarke was once amusing himself 
at some merry pastime with some youths of his 
college, when he suddenly left off at the sight of 
one of the fellows. " Hush, boys," said he, " we 
must be quiet. Here's a fool coming." 



76 TABLE-TALK. 

I must tell you a story of a friend of mine, 
which I take to be a crowning specimen of April- 
fool making. 

Down comes this father of a family one April 
day to breakfast, with a face looking at once 
amused and confounded, as if something had hap- 
pened to him both pleasant and mortifying. The 
mother of the family asks the reason, and all his 
children's eyes are turned on him. He looked at 
first as if he did not like to speak ; but on being 
pressed assumed an aspect of bold acknowledg- 
ment, and said, " Well, my dear, you know I am 
not particular on April days, but certainly I did 
not think that Harriet (one of the servants) would 
have gone so far as this." 

^^ What is it?" 

"Why, she has made an April fool of me ! ! 
I was coming down the stairs, when she requested 
me to have a care of a broom that was lying at 
the bottom of it. There was no broom, and she 
ran away laughing." 

" Well," cries the lady, " of all the bold girls 
I ever met in my life, that Harriet has the great- 
est effrontery." 

The children all joined in the astonishment. 
They never heard of such a thing. It was won- 
derful, shameful, etc. ; but they could not help 
laughing, and the roar became universal. 

" My dear," said Harry gravely, " and you, all 
of you merry young ladies and gentlemen, I have 



PRIVATE WAR. 77 

the pleasure of informing you, all round, and at 
one fell swoop, that you are a parcel of April 
fools." 

PEIYATE WAR. 

In the times when duels were fought with 
swords, the Dutch had a pretty custom (perhaps 
have it still in sequestered places, where virtue 
survives) in which two rustical parties, whenever 
they happened to have an argument over their 
beer, and couldn't otherwise settle it, took out the 
knives with which they had been cutting their 
bread and cheese, and went to it like gentlemen. 
It was called snick-and-snee^ which is understood 
to mean catch and cu% the parties catching hold 
of one another by the collar or waistcoat, and thus 
conveniently sneeing or cutting away, as butchers 
might do at a carcass. A similar custom is re- 
lated of the Highlanders, who, whenever they sat 
down together to dinner, were so prepared for it 
that in case of accidents, that is to say, of argu- 
ments, they stuck their dirks into the board be- 
side their trenchers, so as to have their reasons 
ready at hand. If a man said, " You grow hot 
and ridiculous," out came the cold steel to dis- 
prove his words ; and the question was settled 
upon the most logical military principles. 

Now, if private and public virtue are identi- 
cal, as moralists insist they are, in contradiction 
to the casuists of expediency, there is no reason 



78 TABLE-TALK. 

why the disputes of individuals should not be set- 
tled like those of nations, in the good old Dutch 
and Highland manner. But, at the same time, as 
moralists and casuists alike agree in thinking that 
the more the system of war can be humanized the 
better, I can't but think that an obvious mode 
presents itself of showing the resort to bloodshed 
in its best and most reasonable colors — a light at 
once conclusive and considerate, humane yet val- 
iant, elegant in the accessories, yet as no-nonsense 
and John-Bull like as the perfection of reason can 
desire. War, observe, is a very filthy as well as 
melancholy thing. There can be no doubt of 
that. And, therefore, on the no-nonsense princi- 
ple, the fact is not to be disguised. People, it is 
true, do disguise it ; writers of dispatches dis- 
guise it ; even Wellington says little or nothing 
about it, which I have always thought the only 
blot on the character and candor of that great 
man. But I am sure that, on reflection, and con- 
sidering how %in- English-like such insincerity is, 
the Duke would give up the concealment after 
his usual manly fashion. 

My plan is this : that whenever two gentle- 
men, alive to the merits and necessities of war, 
should happen to have a dispute over their wine, 
they should immediately put on two laced hats, 
call in a band of music from the streets, and after 
hearing a little of it, and marching up and down 
the room with an air of dignified propriety, fall to 



PRIVATE WAR. 79 

it with their fists, and see which can give the other 
the most logical bloody nose. The sight of blood 
adding to the valor of the combatants, the noses 
of course would get worse and worse, and the 
blows heavier and heavier, till both of the war- 
riors reasonably became " sights," and one of the 
two at last fell insensible — that being an evil 
necessary to the termination of the argument. 
Meantime, they would groan considerably, and 
complain in a very touching manner of the kicks 
and cuffs they received on the tenderest parts of 
their bodies (to show that there was "no non- 
sense ") ; a great dust would be struck up from 
the carpet ; pools of blood would properly over- 
flow it (always to show that there was " no non- 
sense ") ; and then, when the fight was over, and 
the band of music had played again, and the 
shrieks in the drawing-room and kitchen had sub- 
sided into those tears and sobs which are the final 
evidences of a state of logical conviction, the 
conqueror (if he was able), or his friends at all 
events, would clear their throats in the most dig- 
nified manner, strike up a hymn, and thank the 
Author of their respective, vitalities that the de- 
feated party had been beaten to a jelly, to the 
special satisfaction of the beater, and the eternal 
honor and glory of the Author of the Universe. 

N. B. — You must be cautious how you doubt 
whether the Author of the Universe takes any 
particular notice of the bloody noses, or whether 



80 TABLE-TALK. 

lie does not rather leave them to work out some 
different third purpose by themselves ; because, 
in that case, you might be charged with wanting 
a due sense of his dignity. On the other hand, 
you must not at all imagine that he approves the 
bloody noses in the abstract as well as concrete ; 
because, in that case, you would be charged with 
doubting his virtue. And, again, you are not to 
fancy that Heaven wishes to put an end to the 
bloody noses altogether ; for that would be quite 
opposed to the principle of " no nonsense." 

Your business is to preach love to your neigh- 
bor, to kick him to bits, and to thank God for the 
contradiction. 

BEAUMAEOHAIS. 

Beaumarchais, author of the celebrated come- 
dy of " Figaro," an abridgment of which has been 
rendered more celebrated by the music of Mozart, 
made a large fortune by supplying the American 
republicans with arms and ammunition, and lost 
it by speculations in salt and printing. His com- 
edy is one of those productions which are account- 
ed dangerous, from developing the spirit of in- 
trigue and gallantry with more gayety than ob- 
jection ; and they would be more undeniably so, 
if the good humor and self-examination to which 
they excite did not suggest a spirit of charity and 
inquiry beyond themselves. 



MOZART. 81 



MOZAET. 



Mozart is wonderful for the endless variety 
and undeviating grace of his invention. Yet his 
wife said of him, that he was a still better dancer 
than musician ! In a soul so full of harmony, 
kindness toward others was to be looked for ; and 
it was found. When a child, he would go about 
asking people " whether they loved him." When 
he was a great musician, a man in distress accost- 
ed him one day in the street ; and, as the com- 
poser had no money to give him, he bade him 
wait a little, while he went into a coffee-house, 
where he wrote a beautiful minuet extempore, 
and, sending the poor man with it to the music- 
seller's, made him a present of the proceeds. This 
is the way that great musicians are made. Their 
sensibility is their genius. 

YIOLET— WITH A DIFFERENCE. 

^' Violet " is thought a suitable name for the 
sweetest heroines of romance, on account of its 
association with the flower ; yet add but a letter 
to it and that not a harsh one, and it becomes 
the most unf eminine of characteristics — Violent. 

VERBAL MISTAKES OF FOREIGNERS. 

The Abbe Georgel, having to send a dinner- 
invitation to Hume from Prince Louis de Rohan, 
6 



82 TABLE-TALK. 

took the opportunity of impressing the historian 
with his knowledge of the English language in 
the following terms : 

"J!£ VAbhe Georgel fait un millio7i de com- 
plimens cL M. Himie. He makes great account of 
his vorlcSj admires her wit, and loves her person.^^ 

If ever Hume shook his fat sides with laugh- 
ter, it must have been at the English of M. I'Abbe 
Georgel. There is an old joke on the coast of 
France about an English lady, who, in putting up 
at an inn, raised a great confusion in the minds 
of the attendants by showing herself very partic- 
ular about her two " sailors " {matelots) ; when all 
that she meant to impress was her nicety respect- 
ing two '^ mattresses " {matelas). The Italians 
have similar jokes about Englishmen declining to 
have any more at dinner, because they have eaten 
^' ships " (the term for which, hastimento, they 
mistake for ahbastanza, enough) ; upon which an- 
other declines too, on the ground that he had eat- 
en " the anchor " (pronouncing dncora instead of 
ancdra, also). I remember an English lady in 
Italy, who became accomplished in the language ; 
but at the outset of her studies it was said of her 
that she one day begged a coachman not to drive 
so fast, by the title of " spoon " : " Spoon, spoon, 
pray not so fast"; using the word cucchiaio in- 
stead of cocchiere. 

The effect of this kind of mistake being in 
proportion to the gravity of the intention, I know 



HUME AND THE THREE LITTLE KINGS. 83 

of none better than that of an honest German 
(the late Mr. Stumpff, the harp-maker), who be- 
ing disgusted at some trait of worldliness which 
he heard related, and wishing to say that rather 
than be guilty of such meanness he would quit 
society for a hermitage, and live upon acorns, 
exclaimed with great animation, " Oh, I shall go 
into de vilderness, and live upon u7iicorns.^^ 

HUME AISTD THE THREE LITTLE K^GS. 

When Hume was in Paris, receiving the hom- 
age of the philosophers for his skepticism, and 
of the courtiers for his advocacy of Charles I., 
three little boys were brought before him to make 
him speeches. They complimented him after the 
fashion of grown persons, said how impatiently 
they had expected his arrival, and expressed their 
admiration of his beautiful history. Alas ! a his- 
tory too much like that of the Stuarts was in prep- 
aration for them. These children were afterward 
the unfortunate Louis XVI., and his brothers 
Louis XVIII. and Charles X. 

" Heaven from all creatures hides the Book of Fate, 
All but the page prescribed — their present state." 

If the poor little boys could have read in that 
tremendous volume, their compliments might 
have been turned in something of this fashion : 
Little Charles X^, — Accept the compliments, 



84 TABLE-TALK. 

Mr. Jacobite, of a prince whom you will help to 
send into exile. 

Little Louis JK^VIIL — And of one whom you 
will help to bring from it, only to let him die of 
fat. 

Little Louis JCVJ. — And of another, whose 
head your beautiful history will help to cut off. 

A OHARMi:tTG CREATUEE. 

Shakespeare, in the compass of a line, has de- 
scribed a thoroughly charming girl : 

" Pretty, and wittj ; wild, and yet, too, gentle." 

baco:n'. 

If I were asked to describe Bacon as briefly 
as I could, I should say that he was the liberator 
of the hands of knowledge. 

SUICIDES OF BUTLERS. 

Tragedy will break in upon one's dinner-table 
in spite of us. Mr. Wakley tells us that suicide 
is rife among butlers ! The news is startling to 
people at dinner. How many faces must have 
been turned on butlers, the day on which the 
coroner made the remark ; and how uncomforta- 
ble some of them must have felt ! The teeto- 
talers will not overlook it ; for the cause appears 
obvious enough. The butler is always sipping. 



DUELS. 85 

He is also the most sedentary of domestics, the 
housekeeper excepted ; and wine-merchants accuse 
him of having a bad conscience. So he grows 
burly and uneasy ; thinks he shall never retire 
into an inn or a public office ; loses bits of his 
property in speculation ; and when the antibilious 
pill fails him, there is an inquest. 

The poor butler should take to his legs instead 
of his arm-chair. He should make himself easier 
in his mind, considering his temptations ; and 
cultivate an interest in everything out of doors, 
except shares in railroads. 

DUELS. 

The only conjecture to be made as to the pos- 
sible utility of duels (on the assumption that the 
retention of any prevailing custom must have 
some foundation in reason) seems to be, that they 
serve to counteract the effeminate tendencies of 
sedentary states of society, and admonish us of 
the healthiness and necessity of courage. 

For as to suffering insolence and outrage, the 
most polished nations of antiquity had no duels, 
and yet never appear to have felt the want of them. 

But the Greeks and Romans, by their wres- 
tling-grounds, and military training, and the very 
nakedness and beauty of their sculpture, main- 
tained a sense of the desirableness of bodily vigor. 

The diffusion of knowledge, however, seems 



86 TABLE-TALK. 

to be conspiring with the increased activity and 
practical good sense of the age to discountenance 
dueling, and render it ridiculous ; and as the oc- 
casions of it are in general really so, while the 
consequences are tragical to the persons con- 
cerned, it is to be hoped that every brave and 
considerate man will do what he can to assist in 
proving it superfluous. 

Did anybody ever wiite a serious panegyric on 
a duel ? It has received hundreds of banters, and 
(consequences apart) has a natural tendency to 
the burlesque. Nay, even those have given rise 
to it in some pensive minds. 

About thirty years ago, there was a famous 
duel about a couple of dogs between a Colonel 
Montgomery and a Captain Macnamara, in which 
the former was killed. The colonel or the captain 
would not '^ call his dog off," and the captain or 
colonel would not hinder his dog from going on ; 
and so 

*' Straight they called for swords and pistols," 

and made a few women and children miserable. 

This catastrophe occasioned a printed elegiac 
poem, the author of which, who was quite serious, 
concluded it with a burst of regret in the follow- 
ing extraordinary triplet : 

" If two fine dogs had quarreled not ! — Oh ! if 
iN'ot fell Montgomery through false honor's tiff^ 
Nor Chalk-Farm witnessed of two heroes' miff! " 



LISTON. 87 



LISTON. 



Talking of paralysis reminds one of the death 
of Liston. Poor fellow ! he had long outlived 
the active portion of his faculties, and used to 
stand at his window by Hyde Park Corner, sadly 
gazing at the tide of human existence which was 
going by, and which he had once helped to en- 
liven. 

Liston's " face was his fortune." He was an 
actor, though truly comic and original, yet of no 
great variety ; and often got credit given him for 
more humor than he intended, by reason of that 
irresistible compound of plainness and pretension, 
of chubbiness and challenge, of born, baggy, de- 
sponding heaviness, and the most ineffable airs 
and graces, which seemed at once to sport with 
and be superior to the permission which it gave 
itself to be laughed at. When Liston expressed 
a peremptory opinion, it was the most incredible 
thing in the world, it was so refuted by some ac- 
companying glance, gesture, or posture of incom- 
petency. When he smiled, his face simmered all 
over with a fondness of self-complacency amount- 
ing to dotage. Never had there been the owning 
of such a soft impeachment. 

Liston was aware of his plainness, and allowed 
himself to turn it to account ; but not, I suspect, 
without a supposed understanding between him 
and the audience as to the superiority of his inteL 



88 TABLE-TALK. 

lectual pretensions ; for, like many comedians, he 
was a grave man underneath his mirth, thought 
himself qualified to be a tragedian, and did, in 
fact, now and then act in tragedy for his benefit, 
with a lamentable sort of respectability that dis- 
appointed the laughers. I have seen him act in 
this way as Octavian in '' The Mountaineers-" 

STEEPLE-OHASmG-. 

Steeple-chasing is to proper bold riding what 
foolhardiness is to courage. It proves nothing 
except that the chaser is in want of a sensation, 
and that he has brains not so much worth taking 
care of as those of other men. 

A. But is it not better than stag-hunting ? 

J3. For the stag, certainly. 

A, There can be no such piteous sight at a 
steeple-chase as may be seen at other kinds of 
hunting. 

£, How can you be sure of that ? I am afraid 
you are severer upon the chasers than I am. 

A. Suppose, as the poet says, 

" A stag comes weeping to a pool." 

^. Good ; but suppose 

" A wife comes weeping to a fooL" 

Suppose Numskull brought home on a shutter. 
Danger for danger's sake is senseless. Besides, 
the horse is worth something. One has no right 



TURKEYS. 89 

to crash and mash it in a pit on the other side of 
a wall, even with the chance of being retributiyely 
kicked to death in its company. Did you ever 
hear this patient and noble creature, the horse, 
scream for anguish ? It is one of the ghastliest 
and most terrific of sounds ; one of the most tre- 
mendous even on a field of battle ; and depend 
upon it, you will catch no old soldier risking the 
chance of hearing it. If you do, he will be no 
Uncle Toby, nor Major Bath, nor the "Iron 
Duke " himself ; but some brazen-faced simple- 
ton, with no more brains in his head than his 
helmet. 

TURKEYS. 

It is amusing to see the turkey strutting and 
gobbling about the homestead. He looks like a 
burlesque on the peacock. Good old Admiral S. ! 
How sorry he was to hear the simile ; and what 
good things he had to say on the worth of turkeys 
in general, and of a foreign species of the race in 
particular. But is it not true ? Look at the ani- 
mal's attempt to get up a sensation with his "tail," 
or what is called such. Look at the short-coming 
size of it, the uncouth heaviness of his body, the 
somber tawdriness of his colors, and, above all, 
that ineffable drawing back of the head and throat 
into an intensity of the arrogant and self-satisfied ! 
He looks like a corpulent fop in a paroxysm of 
conceit. John Reeve was not greater in the char- 



90 TABLE-TALK. 

acter of Marmaduke Magog the beadle, when he 
stamped the ground in a rapture of pomp and 
vanity. Bubb Dodington might have looked so 
when he first put on his peer's robes, and practiced 
dignity before a looking-glass. The name of Bubb 
is very turkey-like. The bird's familiar name in 
Scotland, admirably expressive of its appearance, 
is Bubbly Jock. Goethe says that Nature has a 
lurking sense of comedy in her, and sometimes 
intends to be jocose ; and it is not difficult to 
imagine it when one considers that she includes 
art, and comedy itself, and is the inventress of 
turkeys. 

The turkey is a native of America, and Frank- 
lin recommended it for the national symbol ! 

BAGPIPES. 

An air played on the bagpipes, with that de- 
testable, monotonous drone of theirs for the bass, 
is like a tune tied to a post. 

C-^SAR AND BONAPARTE. 

To-morrow (Sunday, the 15th of the month) 
is the famous Ides of March, the day of the death 
of Csesar. During a conversation which Napoleon 
had with the German poet Wieland, he expressed 
his surprise at the " great blunder " of which 
Caesar was guilty; and, on the poet intimating by 
his look a desire to know what the blunder was, 



PSEUDO-CHRISTIANITY. 91 

his Majesty said, it was trusting people with his 
life whose designs against it he was aware of. 
V/ieland thought within himself, as he contem- 
plated the imperial countenance, " That is a mis- 
take that will never be committed by you." But 
see how dangerous it is for a living man to pro- 
nounce judgment on a dead one. If Napoleon 
would never have committed the mistake of 
Caesar, the accomplished Roman would not have 
fallen, as the other did, for want of knowing the 
character of the nations with whom he fought, 
and the chances of a climate. Now, it is better to 
perish in consequence of having a generous faith 
than a self-satisfied ignorance. 

PSEUDO-CHEISTIANITY. 

Some religious persons the other day, with a 
view to the promotion of " Christian union," had 
a meeting in Birmingham, at which they are said 
to have come to these two resolutions : First, 
that it is " everybody'' s right and duty to exercise 
private judgment in the interpretation of the 
Scriptures" ; and second, that ^'nobody is to be- 
long to their society who does not hold the doc- 
trine of the divine institution of the Christian 
ministry, and the authority and perpetuity of Bap- 
tism and the Lord's Supper." 

This is the way Christianity has been spoilt 
ever since dogma interfered with it — ever since 



92 TABLE-TALK. 

something was put upon it that had nothing to do 
with it, in order that people might dictate to their 
neighbors instead of loving them, and indulge 
their pragmatical egotism at the very moment 
when they pretend to leave judgment free and to 
promote universal brotherhood. It is just as if 
some devil had said : '^ Christianity shall 7iot suc- 
ceed ; people shall not be of one accord, and find 
out what's best for 'em. I'll invent dogma ; I'll 
invent faith versus reason ; I'll invent the Em- 
peror Constantine ; I'll invent councils, popes, po- 
lemics, Calvins and Bonners, inquisitions, auto- 
da-f es, massacres ; and should Christianity survive 
and outgrow these, I'll invent frights about them, 
and whispers in their favor, and little private 
popes of all sorts, all infallible, all fighting with 
one another, all armed with their sine qua 7i07is, 
for the purpose of beating down the olive-branch, 
and preventing their pretended object from super- 
seding my real one." 

I do not believe, mind, that any such thing 
was said, or that this chaos of contradiction has 
been aught else but a fermentation of good and 
ill, out of which good is to come triumphant, per- 
haps the better for the trial ; for evil itself is but 
a form of the desire of good, sometimes a neces- 
sity for its attainment. But the seeming need- 
lessness of so much evil, or for so long a period, 
is provoking to one's uncertainty ; and the sight 
of such a heap of folly is a trial of the patience. 



DYED HAIR. 93 

Our patience we must not lose, for then we shall 
fall into the error we deprecate ; but let us keep 
reason and honest ridicule for ever on the watch. 

A. But they say that ridicule is unfair. 

^. Yes ; and make use of it whenever they 
can. In like manner they deprecate reason, and 
then reason in favor of the deprecation. 

DYED HAIR. 

There is a sly rogue of a fellow advertising in 
the Dublin papers, who is very eloquent and de- 
hortatory on the subject of gray hair. He says 
that people, when they begin to have it, decline 
"in respect and esteem" as '^companionable be- 
ings," particularly with the fair sex ; nay, in their 
own eyes ; and therefore he advises them to lose 
no time in availing themselves of an immense dis- 
covery which he has made, in the shape of a cer- 
tain " coloring material," which turns the hair in- 
stantly to a " luxuriant dark." He tells them that 
it is as easy in the operation as combing, preserves 
and invigorates as well as beautifies, will not 
stain the most delicate linen, is useless for any 
other purpose, and in fine will not cost them a 
farthing. All they have to pay is " two pounds " 
for the secret. He does not quit his theme with- 
out repeating his caution as to the dreadful con- 
sequences that will ensue from neglecting his 
advice — that "decided change," as he calls it, 



94 TABLE-TALK. 

" which a gray or a bald head is sure to produce 
in public, private, and self-esteem." 

Every gentleman, not quite perfect in the color 
of his hair, must start at this advertisement, " like 
a guilty thing surprised." He must think of all 
the friends, particularly female ones, in whose 
eyes he might or ought to have noticed a mani- 
fest decrease of his acceptability ; must begin to 
reflect how painful it is to lose caste as a " com- 
panionable being " ; and what steps he ought to 
take, in order to recover his threatened standing 
in public and private estimation. "Good heav- 
en ! " he will exclaim, looking in the glass, " and 
is it come to this ? I see it ; I feel it. Yes, there 
is a ^ decided change ' ; virtue is gone out of me. 
Miss Dickenson looks odd ; Lady Charlotte is dig- 
nified ; nobody w^ill hold me in any further re- 
gard ; perhaps I shall lose my office, my estate, 
my universe. I am a lost, middle-tinted man." 

So saying, he disburses his two pounds in a 
frenzy, realizes the wonderful dark hair immedi- 
ately; and, in the course of two days, what is the 
consequence ? I remember an elderly gentleman 
whose sister persuaded him to adopt one of these 
two-pound secrets that cost nothing. All he had 
to do was to make use of a comb dipped in the 
preparation, and the fine dark color undoubtedly 
resulted. In the course of a few hours it changed 
to a beautiful blue ; and he had the greatest dif- 
ficulty, for days after, to get rid of it. 



EATING. 95 



EATING. 



Talk of indulgence in eating as you may, and 
avoid excess of it as we must, it is not a little 
wonderful to consider what respect Nature enter- 
tains for the process, and how doubly strange and 
monstrous the consideration renders the wants of 
the half -starved. It throws us back upon thoughts 
more amazing still. We observe that the vital 
principle in the universe, instead of, or perhaps in 
addition to, its embodying itself in the shapes of 
created multitudes throughout the apparently un- 
inhabited portions of space, tends to concentrate 
its phenomena into distinct dwelling-places, or 
planets, in which they are so crowded together 
(though even then .with large seeming intervals) 
that they are compelled to keep down the pop- 
ulations of one another by mutual devourment. 
Fortunately (so to speak, without meaning at all 
to assume that fortune settles the matter), this 
cruel-looking tendency is accompanied by Nature's 
usual beneficent tendency to produce a greater 
amount of pleasure than pain ; for the duration 
of the act of dying, or of being killed, is in no in- 
stance comparable with that of the state of being 
alive ; and life, upon the whole, is far more plea- 
surable than painful (otherwise we should not feel 
pain so impatiently when it comes). The swallow 
snaps up the fly ; the fly has had its healthy plea- 
sures ; and one dish entertains at a time many hu- 



96 TABLE-TALK. 

man feasters. Now think of the enormous multi- 
tude of those dishes — of the endless varieties of 
food which Nature seems to have taken a delight 
in providing, and of the no less diversity of tastes 
and relishes with which she has recommended 
them to our palates. Take the list of eatables for 
mankind alone (if any cook could make one out), 
and think of its endless variety of fish, flesh, and 
fowl, of fruits, and vegetables, and minerals ; how 
many domestic animals it includes ; how many 
wild ones ; how many creatures out of the sea ; 
how many trees and shrubs ; how many plants 
and herbs ; how many lands, oceans, airs, climates, 
countries, besides the combinations producible out 
of all these results by the art of cookery (for art 
is also Nature's doing) ; modifications of roast and 
boiled and broiled, of pastries, jellies, creams, con- 
fections, essences, preserves. One would fancy 
that she intended us to do nothing but eat ; and, 
indeed, a late philosopher said that her great law 
was, " Eat, or be eaten." The philosopher obeyed 
it pretty stoutly himself (it was Darwin), and he 
inculcated it (one would think with no great ne- 
cessity) on his patients ; some of whose biliary 
vessels must have contributed to pay him well for 
the advice. 

For here is the puzzle. A man stands equally 
astonished at the multitude of his temptations to 
eat, at the penalty of the indulgence, and at the 
starvations of the poor. I am not going to enter 



EATING. 97 

into the question, or to endeavor to show how it 
may be reconciled with the beneficence of Nature 
in a large and final point of view, the only point 
in which her great operations can be regarded. 
What I meant to show was her respect for this 
eating law of hers, and the astonishing spirit of 
profusion in which she has poured forth materials 
for its exercise. Why we are not all individually 
rich or healthy enough to do it justice is another 
question, which can not, indeed, but suggest itself 
during the consideration. Mr. Malthus (as if that 
mended the matter) said there was not room 
enough to squeeze in at the table between himself 
and his bishop ! Let us comfort ourselves (till 
the question is settled) by reflecting that the mor- 
tal portion of Mr. Malthus, and of the bishop too, 
have gone to nourish the earth which is to support 
the coming generations. "Fat be the gander" 
(as the poet says) "that feeds on their grave." 

If you are ever at a loss to support a flagging 
conversation, introduce the subject of eating. Sir 
Robert Walpole's secret for unfailing and har- 
monious table-talk was gallantry ; but this will 
not always do, especially as handled by the jovial 
minister. Even scandal will not be welcome to 
everybody. But who doesn't eat ? And who can 
not speak of eating ? The subject brightens the 
eyes and awakens the tender recollections of every- 
body at table — from the little boy with his beatific 
vision of dumpling, up to the most venerable per- 
7 



98 TABLE-TALK. 

son present, who mumbles his grouse. " He that 
will not mind his dinner," said Johnson, "will 
mind nothing " (he put it stronger ; but honest 
words become vulgarized, and the respectable term 
"stomach" won't fit). Ask a lady if she is at- 
tached to the worthiest gentleman in the room, 
and she will reasonably think you insult her ; but 
ask if she is '^fond of ^6a^," and she either en- 
thusiastically assents, or expresses a sweet and 
timid doubt on the subject— an apologetical in- 
ability to accord with those who are. She " canH 
S2ij she is." "Love" was formerly the word; 
perhaps is still. 

" Do you love pig ? " 

" No, I can't say I do ; but I dote upon eels.'' 

Questioner (looJcmg enchanted). "Really! 
Well, so do I." 

Dishes are bonds, not only of present, but of 
absent unanimity. I remember an uxorious old 
gentleman, who had a pretty wife that he was rec- 
ommending one day to the good graces of a lady 
at the head of a table. His wife was not present ; 
but he had been expatiating on her merits, and 
saying how Mrs. Scrivelsby did this thing and 
did that, and what a charming, elegant woman 
she was, when the conversation became diverted 
to other topics, and the lady's accomplishments 
lost sight of. The gentleman's hostess happening 
to speak of some fish at table, he asked if she 
" loved the roe " ; and upon her owning that 



POLAND AND KOSCIUSKO 99 

" soft impeachment," and being helped to some, 
he exclaimed, in the fondest tones, with a face 
full of final bliss, and radiant with the thoughts 
of the two sympathizing women, the absent and 
the present — 

" Do you, indeed ? Well, now, Mrs. Scrivelsby 
loves the roe." 

N. B. — If anybody sees "nothing" in this 
story, he is hereby informed that he has made a 
discovery unawares ; for that is precisely the 
value of it. 

pola:n'd and kosciusko. 

The claims of Poland may be imperfect. She 
was once badly governed ; there is no doubt of 
that ; but so are many nations who, nevertheless, 
very properly decline to be governed by others ; 
and, besides, she has had bitter teaching, and pro- 
fesses to have learned by it. Her leaders are not 
so confined, as they are supposed to be, to the 
aristocracy. Kosciusko himself was no aristocrat 
— hardly, indeed, a Pole proper. He was a small 
gentleman of Lithuania ; but he loved his half- 
countrymen, the Poles ; and he thought, with 
Blake, that they ought not to be "fooled by 
foreigners." 

One of the most affecting of national anec- 
dotes is related of this great man during the first 
occupation of France by the Allies. He was then 

LOFC, 



100 TABLE-TALK. 

living there, but siding neither with the Allies 
nor with Bonaparte. He never did side with 
either. He knew both the parties too well. A 
Polish troop in the allied service came foraging 
in his neighborhood, and they took liberties with 
his humble garden. The owner came out of the 
house, and remonstrated with them in their own 
language. 

" Who are you," said they, exasperated, " that 
are not on our side, and yet dare to speak to us in 
this manner ? " 

" My name is Kosciusko." 

They fell at his feet, and worshiped him. 

El^GLAND AND THE POPE (GREGOEY). 

The Pope, instead of attending to the welfare 
of the unfortunate people whom he governs, and 
saving his country from the reproach of being the 
worst governed state in Europe, is putting up 
prayers to Heaven for the conversion of England ! 
He might as well come to London, and try to con- 
vert Mr. Cobden to the corn-laws, or the railway 
companies to the old roads. 

About eighty years ago, a Scotsman went to 
Rome for the purpose of converting the Pope. 
The Scotsman was not content with praying. He 
boldly entered St. Peter's at high mass, and ad- 
dressed his Holiness in a loud voice, by the title 
of a certain lady who lives not a hundred miles 



THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON'S CONCERT. 101 

from Babylon. The Pope, who at that time, 
luckily for the Scotsman, happened to be a kind 
and sensible man (Ganganelli), was advised to 
send him to the galleys ; but he answered that 
the galleys were but a sorry place to teach people 
" good breeding " ; so he put the honest fanatic 
into a ship, and sent him home again to Scotland. 

We, in England here, should be equally civil 
to the Pope, if he would do us the honor of a visit ; 
and he might take Dr. Pusey away with him if he 
pleased, together with a score or two of ladies and 
gentlemen who constitute converted England. 

It is a little too late in the day to expect Eng- 
lishmen to pant after purgatory and confession ; 
to rejoice in the damnation of their fathers and 
mothers and little children ; or even to wish for 
the celibacy of their clergy. Their clergy are 
accused of being lively enough already toward 
the ladies. What would they be if they had 
no wives ? " Gracious heavens ! " Why, in the 
course of six months the bench of bishops would 
be as bad as cardinals. 



THE DUKE OF WELLmGTON^'S CONCERT. 

The Duke of Wellington has been directing a 
concert of Ancient Music. It is curious to see the 
music he selected : what a mixture it is of devo- 
tion, fighting, and gallantry ; how he abides by 
the favorites of his youth ; and how pleasantly, 



102 TABLE-TALK. 

and like a good son, he includes the comjDositions 
of his father. Lord Mornington. Conquerors deal 
in such tremendous (and disputable) wares, that 
it is not easy to determine the amount of their 
genius — to distinguish it from chances and conse- 
quences, or to say how much of it is not owing to 
negative as well as positive qualities. The world 
are hardly in a condition to judge a man who 
plays at chess with armies ; who bloAVS us up, 
takes us by storm and massacre, and alters the 
face of nations. He may or may not be as great 
as we suppose ; though his want of civil talents 
is generally against him, and he often perishes 
out of imprudence. But there can be no doubt 
that a great soldier is a very striking and impor- 
tant person of some kind ; and to catch him at 
these soft, harmonious, and filial amusements is 
interesting. The Duke's concert the other day 
was in good old taste, not omitting some of the 
later great masters. There was plenty of Handel 
in it ; some Gluck and Paisiello, Beethoven and 
Mozart ; Avison's " Sound the loud timbrel " ; a 
glee of Webbe's ; another by his Grace's father, 
aforesaid ; and the fine old French air, " Char- 
mante Gabrielle," which, an arch rogue of a critic 
says, was sung in a " chaste manner " by Madame 
Caradori. Not that the chastity is to be doubted, 
or that the air was not one of recognized propri- 
ety ; but it is worth considering how 

" Nice customs curtsey to great kings " ; 



THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON'S CONCERT. 103 

what storms of honor and glory, and royal and 
national trumpets, have been allowed to smuggle 
into good society the " Charming Gabrielle," mis- 
tress of Henri Quatre ; and how the fair singer 
would have been scared at being requested to do 
as much for the charming Jane Shore, or giddy 
Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn. 

The Duke of Wellington's was a right sol- 
dier's concert, a little overdone perhaps in the 
church-going quarter — a little too much on the 
oratorio side ; but that might have been looked 
for at an "Ancient Concert," famous for mem- 
ories of George the Third. The rest was given 
to love and fighting — to " Gird on thy Sword," 
and " Giving them Hailstones," and " Charming 
Gabrielle," and the ladies' duet in Mozart, " Pren- 
dero quel brunettino " (I'll take that little brown 
fellow), which may have been connected with 
some pleasing reminiscences of country-quarters 
or the jungles of Hyderabad. 

But the paternal glee, after all, was the thing ; 
the filial reminiscence ; the determination of the 
great " iron " Duke to stand by his little, gentle, 
accomplished father, the amateur composer — and 
a very pretty composer too. All soldiers can go 
to church and admire charming Gabrielles ; but 
it is not for every great fame thus to stand by a 
minor one, and take a pride in showing off the 
father on whose knee it sat in its infancy. 

The Duke is a good fellow, depend upon it, 



104 TABLE-TALK. 

"iifie patre judice. He may give odd answers to 
deputations, and be " curst and brief " to auto- 
graph-seekers, and not know how to talk in their 
own language to his warm-hearted Irish country- 
men. I wish he did. But he sticks to his father. 
He will have due honor paid to the paternal 
crotchets. 

WAE, DINIlTEE, A-^J) THAKKSGIYING. 

It is not creditable to a "thinking people" 
that the two things thay most thank God for 
should be eating and fighting. We say grace 
w^hen we are going to cut up lamb and chicken, 
and when we have stuffed ourselves with both to 
an extent that an orang-outang would be ashamed 
of ; and we offer up our best praises to the Crea- 
tor for having bloAvn and sabered his " images," 
our fellow creatures, to atoms, and drenched them 
in blood and dirt. This is odd. Strange that we 
should keep our most pious transports for the 
lowest of our appetites and the most melancholy 
of our necessities ! that we should never be 
wrought up into paroxysms of holy gratitude but 
for bubble and squeak, or a good-sized massacre ! 
that we should think it ridiculous to be asked to 
say grace for a concert or a flower-show, or the 
sight of a gallery of pictures, or any other of the 
divinest gifts of Heaven, yet hold it to be the 
most natural and exalted of impulses to fall on 
our knees for having kicked, beaten, torn, 3hat- 



WAR, DINNER, AND THANKSGIVING. 105 

tered, drowned, stifled, exenterated, mashed and 
abolished thousands of our " neighbors," whom 
we are directed to " love as ourselves " ! 

A correspondent of the " Times," who had of 
course been doing his duty in this respect, and 
thanking Heaven the first thing every morning 
for the carnage in the Punjaub, wished the other 
day to know " what amount of victory was con- 
sidered, by the Church or State, to call forth a 
public expression of thankfulness to Almighty 
God." He was angry that the Bishops had not 
been up and stirring at the slaughter ; that Sir 
Robert Peel was not as anxious to sing hymns 
for it as to feed the poor ; that Lord John Rus- 
sell, with all his piety, was slower to call for re- 
joicings over the Sikh widows than attention to 
hapless Ireland. 

The pause did Government honor. The omis- 
sion of the ceremony, if they had had courage 
enough to pass it by altogether, would have done 
them more. Not because God is not to be rever- 
enced in storm as in sunshine, but because it does 
not become any section of his creatures to trans- 
late these puzzles of the mystery of evil in their 
own favor, and, with the presumptuous vanity 
called humility, thank Him, like the Pharisee, for 
not being conquered like "those" Indians. Our 
meddling with the Punjaub at all is connected 
with some awkward questions. So is our whole 
Indian history. I believe it to have been the in- 



106 TABLE-TALK. 

evitable, and therefore, in a large and final point 
of view, the justifiable and desirable consequence 
of that part of the " right of might " which con- 
stitutes the only final secret of the phrase, and 
which arises from superior knowledge and the 
healthy power of advancement. But in the hu- 
mility becoming such doubtful things as human 
conclusions, it behooves us not to play the fop at 
every step ; not to think it necessary to God's 
glory or satisfaction to give Him our "sweet 
voices," even though we do it in their most sneak- 
ing tones ; nor to thank the good Father for hav- 
ing been chosen to be the scourgers of our weaker 
brethren. 

"Go," we might imagine Him saying; "go, 
and hold your tongues, and be modest. Don't 
afllict me during the necessity with your stupid 
egotism. Perhaps I chose you for the task, only 
because you had the less sensibility." 

FIEES AND MARTYEDOM. 

Fires are still happening every day, notwith- 
standing the tremendous lessons which they give 
to the incautious. People are shocked at the 
moment, and say that something must be done ; 
but in the course of four-and-twenty hours they 
forget the shrieking females at the windows, and 
the children reduced to ashes ; and the calamities 
are risked as before. It is really a pity that Par- 



FIRES AND MARTYRDOM. 107 

liament does not interfere. Officious legislation 
is bad ; but if the public are children in this re- 
spect, and don't know how to take care of them- 
selves, grown understandings ought to help them. 
Parliament can ordain matters about lamps and 
pavements ; why not about balconies for great 
houses, and corridors at the back of smaller ones ? 
Are health and convenience of more importance 
than being saved from the crudest of deaths ? 

Meantime, what an opportunity presents itself 
to Puseyites and others for a little indisputable 
Christianity — a good practical restitution of their 
favorite days of martyrdom and self-sacrifice. It 
i^ said that no calamitous chance of things is ever 
done away with in this country, unless some great 
man happens to be the victim. Now, the Pusey- 
ites are accused of being Christian only in dis- 
putation, with great dislikes of foregoing their 
comforts and snug corners. Here is an occasion 
for them to prove their brotherly love — to show 
how their gold can be tried in the fire. Why can 
not Dr. Pusey, or Mr. Newman, or Mr. Wells 
(who admires the tapers and other splendid shows 
of Popery) be a shining light himself, of the 
most unquestionable order ? Why not take some 
house about to be pulled down in a great thor- 
oughfare, assemble a crowd at night-time, set fire 
to the goods and chattels round about him like an 
Indian widow, step forth into the balcony to show 
lis how easy it was for him to escape, and then, in 



108 TABLE-TALK. 

spite of our cries, tears, agonies, and imploring 
remonstrances (the more, the memorabler), offer 
himself up, like a second Polycarp, on the altar 
of human good ? Invidious people say, that it is 
no very difficult thing for a man to be a shining 
light in a good comfortable pulpit, between break- 
fast and dinner, with no greater heat on him than 
that of his self-complacency ; but the Ridleys 
and Bradford s found a different business of it at 
the stake ; and here is an opportunity for such as 
sneer at those Protestant martyrs, to show how 
they can be martyrs themselves of a nobler sort, 
and of the most undoubted utility. For who 
could forget the circumstance ? what balconies 
and corridors would not start forth to their honor 
and glorification all over the metropolis ? 

But perhaps the Bishop of London, who is 
jealous of his prerogative, might choose to avail 
himself of the opportunity. Or suppose Bishop 
Philpotts requested it of him as a favor. What 
a truly reviving spectacle, in these days of Chris- 
tian declension, to see the two bishops, at the last 
moment, affectionately contesting with one an- 
other the honor of the sacrifice, and trying to 
thrust his brother off the devoted premises ! 

KESPEOTABILITY. 

" When the question was put to one of the 
witnesses on the trial of Thurtell, ' What sort of 



RESPECTABILITY. 109 

a person was Mr. Weare ? ' the answer was, ' Mr. 
Weare was respectable,^ On being pressed by the 
examining counsel as to what he meant by re- 
spectability, the definition of the witness was, 
that ' he 'kept a gig ! ' " 

" A person," says the '^ York Courant," on 
this incident, '^ was annoying a whole company in 
a public room, and one of them reproving him 
sharply for his indecorum, an apologist whispered : 
' Pray, do not offend the gentleman ; I assure you 
he is a respectable man. He is worth two hundred 
a year independent property!''^ 

There is no getting at the root of these mat- 
ters, unless we come to etymology. People mean 
something when they say a man is respectable ; 
they mean something different from despicable or 
intolerable. What is it they do mean ? Why, 
they mean that the gentleman is worth tvnce look- 
ing at — he is respectable, re-spectabilis ; that is to 
say, literally, one who is to be looked at again. 
You must not pass him as though he were a com- 
mon man ; you must turn round and observe him 
well ; a second look is necessary if you have the 
least respect for him ; if you have more, you look 
at him again and again ; and if he is very re- 
spectable indeed, and you have the soul of a foot- 
man, you look at him till he is out of sight, and 
turn away with an air as if you could black his 
shoes for him. 

But what is ^^respectable " ? What is the vir- 



110 TABLE-TALK. 

tiie that makes a man worth twice looking at ? 
We have intimated it in what has been said. The 
^' York Courant " has told us — he keeps a gig. 
Gig is virtue. A buggy announces moral worth. 
Curricidus evehit ad deos. 

But you must be sure that he does keep it. 
He may come in a gig, and yet the gig not be his 
own ; in which case it behooves you to be cau- 
tious. You must not be taken in by appearances. 
He may look like a gentleman ; he may be decent- 
ly dressed ; you may have seen him perform a 
charitable action ; he may be a soldier covered 
with scars, a patriot, a poet, a great philosopher ; 
but for all this, beware how you are in too much 
haste to look twice at him — the gig may have been 
borrowed. 

On the other hand, appearances must not con- 
demn a man. A fellow (as you may feel inclined 
to call him) drives up to the door of an inn ; his 
face (to your thinking) is equally destitute of sense 
and goodness ; he is dressed in a slang manner, 
calls for his twentieth glass of gin, has flogged 
his horse till it is raw, and condemns^ with ener- 
getic impartiality, the eyes of all present, his 
horse's, the bystanders', and his own. Now, be- 
fore you pronounce this man a blackguard, or 
think him rather to be turned away from with 
loathing than looked at twice out of respect, be- 
have you as impartially as he : take the ostler aside, 
or the red-faced fellow whom he has brought in 



RESPECTABILITY. Ill 

the gig with him^ and ask, "Is the gig his own ? " 
The man, for aught you know, may reply : " His 
own ? Lord love you, he has a mint of money. 
He could ride in his coach if he pleased. He has 
kept a gig and Moll Fist these two years." Thus 
you see, without knowing it, you might have 
loathed a respectable man. "He keeps his gig." 

But this respectable gentleman not only keeps 
his gig — he might keep his coach. He is respect- 
able in esse ; in posse he is as respectable as a 
sheriff : you may look twice at him ; nay, many 
times. Let us see. We have here a clew to the 
degrees of a man's respectability. To keep a gig 
is to be simply respectable : you may look twice at 
the gig-man. A curricle, having two horses, and 
costing more, is, of course, more respectable : you 
may look at the possessor of a curricle at least 
twice and a half. A chariot renders him fit to be 
regarded over and over again ; a vv^hole carriage 
demands that you should many times turn your 
neck to look at him ; if you learn that he drives a 
coach and four, the neck may go backward and 
forward for three minutes ; and if the gentleman 
abounds in coaches, his own carriage for himself, 
and another for his wife, together with gig, bug- 
gy, and dog-cart, you are bound to stand watch- 
ing him all the way up Pall Mall, your head going 
like a fellow's jaws over a pan-pipe, and your neck 
becoming stiff with admiration. 

The story of the "two hundred a year inde- 



112 TABLE-TALK. 

pendent property " is a good appendage to that of 
the gig-keeping worthy. The possessor of this 
virtue was annoying a whole company in a public 
room, and one of them reproving him for his in- 
decorum, somebody whispered : " Do not offend 
the gentleman ; he is a respectable man, I assure 
you. He is worth two hundred a year indepen- 
dent property." The meaning of this is : "I am a 
slave, and believe you to be a slave : think what 
strutting fellows we should be if we possessed two 
hundred a year ; and let us respect ourselves in 
the person of this bully." 

If people of this description could translate the 
feelings they have toward the rich, such is the 
language their version would present to them, 
and it might teach them something which they 
are ignorant of at present. The pretense of some 
of them is, that money is a great means of good 
as well as evil, and that of course they should 
secure the good and avoid the evil. But this is 
not the real ground of their zeal ; otherwise they 
would be zealous in behalf of health, temperance, 
and honesty, good-humor, fair dealing, generosity, 
sincerity, public virtue, and everything else that 
advances the good of mankind. No ; it is the 
pure, blind love of power, and the craving of 
weakness to be filled with it. Allowance should 
be made for much of it, as it is the natural abuse 
in a country where the most obvious power is 
commercial ; and the blindest love of power, af- 



USE OF WORD "ANGEL," IN LOVE-MAKING. 113 

ter all (let them be told this secret for the com- 
fort of human nature), is an instinct of sympathy 
— is founded on what others will think of us, and 
what means we shall find in our hands for adding 
to our importance. It is this value for one an- 
other's opinion which keeps abuses so long in 
existence ; but it is in the same corner of the 
human heart, now that reform has begun, that 
the salvation of the world will be found. 

USE OF THE WORD " ANGEL," ETC., IN LOVE- 
MAKING. 

Lady Suffolk, when bantering Lord Peter- 
borough on his fondness for the fine terms used 
in love-making, said that all she argued for was, 
that as these expressions had been in all ages the 
favorite words of fine gentlemen, who would per- 
suade themselves and others that they are in love, 
those who really are in love should discard them, 
the better to distinguish themselves from impos- 
tors. But, with submission to her ladyship, a 
real lover may take them up again, as they were 
first taken up, because with him the language is 
still natural. 

ELOQUENCE OF OMISSION. 

A late gallant Irishman, who sometimes 
amused the House of Common and alarmed the 
Ministers with his brusquerie (Mr. Montague 



114 TABLE-TALK. 

Mathew, I believe), set an ingenious example to 
those who are at once forbidden to speak, and 
yet resolved to express their thoughts. There 
was a debate upon the treatment of Ireland, and 
the General, having been called to order for taking 
unseasonable notice of the enormities attributed 
to Government, spoke to the foUornng effect : 
" Oh, very well ; I shall say nothing then about 
the murders — {Order, order!) — ^I shall make no 
mention of the massacres — {Sear, hear ! Order !) 
— Oh, well ; I shall sink all allusion to the in- 
famous half -hangings— ( Order, order! Chair !) " 
This Montague Mathew was the man who, 
being confounded on some occasion with Mr. 
Mathew Montague (a much softer-spoken gentle- 
man), said, with great felicity, that people might 
as well confound '^ a chestnut horse with a horse- 
chestnut." 

GODS OF HOMEE AND LUCRETIUS. 

Sir William Temple says that he '' does not 
know why the account given by Lucretius of the 
gods should be thought more impious than that 
given by Homer, who makes them not only sub- 
ject to all the weakest passions, but perpetually 
busy in all the worst or meanest actions of men." 
Perhaps the reason is, that in Homer they retain 
something of sympathy with others, however mis- 
directed or perturbed ; whereas the gods of Lu- 



UMBRELLAS. 115 

cretins are a set of selfish bons-vivants, living by 
themselves and caring for nobody. 

Alsr INVISIBLE RELIC. 

Bruges is the place where the Catholics pro- 
fessed to have in their keeping the famous hau de 
Saint Joseph; that is to say, one of the hoPs 
which St. Joseph used to utter when in the act of 
cleaving wood as a carpenter. The reader may 
think this a Protestant invention ; but the story 
is true. Bayle mentions the ho in his Dictionary. 

A NATURAL MISTAKE. 

A little girl seeing it written over inn doors, 
''Good stabling and an ordinary on Sundays," 
thought that the stabling was good on week-days 
but only ordinary on the Sabbath. 

MORTAL GOOD EFFECTS OF MATRIMONY. 

A lady meeting a girl who had lately left her 
service, inquired, " Well, Mary ! where do you live 
now ? " " Please ma'am," answered the girl, " I 
don't live now — I'm married." 

UMBRELLAS. 

From passages in the celebrated verses of 
Swift on a ''Shower," which appeared in 1770, 
and in Gay's poem of " Trivia, or the Art of walk- 



116 TABLE-TALK. 

ing tlie Streets," which was written a year or two 
afterward, it would seem that the use of umbrel- 
las at that time was confined to females, and those 
too of the poorer classes. The ladies either rode 
in their carriages through the rain, or were obliged 
to fly from it into shops. 

" Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down, 
Threatening with deluge this devoted town. 
To shops in crowds the draggled females fly, 
Pretend to cheapen goods, but nothing buy. 
The Templar spruce, while every spout's abroach, 
Stays till 'tis fair, yet seems to call a coach. 
The tucked-up seamstress walks with hasty strides, 
While streams run down her oiled umbrella's sides." 

There is no mention of an umbrella for men. 
The men got under a shed, like the Templar, into 
a coach, or into a sedan. 

" Here various kinds, by various fortunes led, 
Commence acquaintance underneath a shed ; 
Triumphant Tories and desponding "Whigs 
Forget their feuds, and join to save their wigs. 
Boxed in a chair, the beau impatient sits. 
While spouts run clattering o'er the roof by fits ; 
And ever and anon, with frightful din. 
The leather sounds : he trembles from within. 
So when Troy-chairmen bore the wooden steed, 
Pregnant with Greeks, impatient to be freed 
(Those bully Greeks, who, as the moderns do, 
Instead of paying chairmen, run them through), 
Laocoon struck the outside with his spear, 
And each imprisoned hero quaked for fear." 



BOOKSELLERS' DEVICES. 117 

In Gay's poem, the men are advised, in case 
the weather threatens rain, to put on their surtouts 
and worst wigs. The footman, he says, lets down 
the flat of his hat. Even among the females, the 
use of the umbrella appears to have been confined 
to winter-time : 

*^ Good housemves all the winter's rage despise, 
Defended by the riding-hood's disguise ; 
Or, underneath the umbrella's oily shed, 
Safe through the wet, on chinking pattens tread. 
Let Persian dames th' umbrella's ribs display, 
To guard their beauties from the sunny ray ; 
Or sweating slaves support the shady load, 
"When Eastern monarchs show their state abroad : 
Britain in tointer only knows its aid, 
To guard from chilly show'rs the walking maid." 

When Jonas Hanway made his appearance 
with an umbrella, the vulgar hooted him for his 
effeminacy. 

Umbrellas, it is observable, are always men- 
tioned as being oiled. I think I remember the 
introduction of silken ones. 



BOOKSELLERS' DEVICES. 

Mr. Pickering, with no unpleasing pedantry, 
gives his edition of the Poets the epithet of " Al- 
dine." Aldus was the great elegant publisher of. 
his day, and Mr. Pickering is ambitious of being 
thought his follower. He adopts his device in 



118 TABLE-TALK. 

the title-page, with a motto calculated to mystify 
the unlearned — " Aldi Discipulus Anglus " ; to 
wit, Aldus's English Disciple. This is good, be- 
cause anything is good that has faith in books or 
elegance of choice ; but, inasmuch as originality 
is a good addition to it, a device of Mr. Picker- 
ing's own would have been better. Aldus's dol- 
phin IS very well done, but it is somewhat heavy. 
Mr. Taylor, the printer, a man of liberal knowl- 
edge, has a device of his own — a hand pouring 
oil into the midnight lamp ; and the late Mr. 
Valpy had another, not so good, a digamma (the 
Greek F), which looked like an improvement upon 
a gallows. It seemed as if it was intended to 
hang two commentators instead of one ; or the 
parson, with his clerk underneath him. 

WOMEI^ 0:^" THE EIGHT SIDE. 

Dr. A. Hunter said that women who love their 
husbands generally lie on their right side. What 
did he mean by " generally " ? Women who love 
their husbands always lie on the right side, for 
an obvious reason — to wit, that they can not lie 
on the wrong one. 

SHENSTONE MISTAKEN. 

It is strange that Shenstone should have thought 
his name liable to no pun. A man might have 
convinced him to the contrary, after the fashion 



THE MARSEILLES HYMN. 119 

in which Johnson proposed to help f orgetf ulness. 
" Sir," said the Doctor to somebody who was com- 
plaining of short memory, *4et me give you a 
kick on the shin, and I'll be bound you'll never 
forget it." So a man might have thrown a stone 
at Shenstone's leg and said, " There, Mr. Shin- 
stone " ; for, as to the i and the e, no punster 
stands upon ceremony with a vowel. 

THE MARSEILLES HYMN". 

The "Marseilles Hymn," though not in the 
very highest class of art, in which pure feeling 
supersedes the necessity of all literal expression, 
is nevertheless one of those genuine compositions, 
warm from the heart of a man of genius, which 
are qualified to please the highest of the scien- 
tific, and those who know nothing of music but 
by the effect it has upon them. The rise upon 
the word Patrie (or, as the English translator 
has very well made it fall, upon the word Glory) 
is a most elevating note of preparation ; this no 
sooner rouses us to war, than we are reminded of 
the affecting necessity for it in the threats of the 
tyrants, followed by that touching passage re- 
specting the tears and cries of our kindred ; and 
then comes another exalting note — the call to 
arms. The beating of the drum succeeds. We 
fancy the hurried muster of the patriots ; their 
arms are lifted, their swords unsheathed ; and 



120 TABLE-TALK. 

then comes the march — a truly grand movement 
— which even on the piano-forte suggests the full- 
ness of a band. In the pathetic part, the E flat 
on the word fils and the whole strain on that pas- 
sage are particularly affecting. The tears seem 
to come into the eyes of the heroes, as no doubt 
they have into thousands of them, and into thou- 
sands of those that have heard the song. But it 
must be played well, and not be judged of by the 
performance of a new or a feeble hand. 

I know not who the author of the translation, 
or rather imitation, is, but he has done it very 
well. 

NON-SEQUITUR. 

There is a punning epigram by Dr. Donne 
which is false in its conclusion : 

" ' I am unable,' yonder beggar cries, 
' To stand or go.' If he says true, he lies.'^ 

No ; because he may lean, or be held- up. 



JSTON-RHYMES. 

It is curious that in so correct a writer as 
Pope, and in so complete a poem as the " Rape 
of the Lock," there should be two instances of 
rhyme which are none at all : 

**But this bold Lord, with manly strength endued^ 
She with one finger and a thumb sn'bdued.''^ 



STOTHARD. 121 

" The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; 
At length, the wits mount up, the hairs subsic?^." 

They are both in the fifth canto. There is an- 
other in the " Essay on Criticism " : 

*^ Unfinished things one knows not what to call^ 
Their generation's so equivocal." 



STOTHAED. 

The death of Stothard grieved all the lovers 
of art, though it had been long expected. They 
regretted to think that they could have no '^ more 
last words " from his genius — no more of those 
sweet and graceful creations of youth, beauty, 
and womanhood, which never ceased to flow from 
his pencil, and which made his kindly nature the 
abode of a youthful spirit to the last. An angel 
dwelt in that tottering house, amid the wintery 
bowers of white locks, warming it to the last with 
summer fancies. 

Stothard had the soul in him of a genuine 
painter. He was a designer, a colorist, a group- 
er ; and, above all, he had expression. All that 
he wanted was a better education, for he was 
never quite sure of his drawing. The want was 
a great one ; but, if those who most loudly ob- 
jected to it had had a tenth part of his command 
over the human figure, or even of his knowledge 
of it (for the purposes of expression), they would 



122 TABLE-TALK. 

have had ten times the right to venture upon criti- 
cising him ; and, having that, they would have 
spoken of him with reverence. His class was not 
of the highest order, and yet it bordered upon the 
gentler portion of it, and partook of that portion ; 
for, since the days of the great Italian painters, 
no man felt or expressed the graces of innocence 
and womanhood as he did. And his coloring 
(which was little known) had the true relish, 
such as it was. He loved it, and did not color 
for effect only. He had a bit of Rubens in him, 
and a bit of Raphael — and both of them genuine ; 
not because he purposely imitated them, but be- 
cause the seeds of gorgeousness and of grace were 
in his own mind. The glowing and sweet painter 
was made out of the loving and good-natured 
man. This is the only process. The artist, let 
him be of what sort he may, is only the man re- 
flected on canvas. The good qualities and defects 
of his nature are there ; and there they will be, 
let him deny or disguise them as he can. In 
youth, Stothard was probably too full of enjoy- 
ment, and had too little energy, to study proper- 
ly. In the greater masters, enjoyment and energy, 
sensibility and strength of purpose, went together. 
Inferiority was the consequence ; but inferiority 
only to them. The genius was indestructible. 

Stothard, for many years, was lost sight of by 
the public, owing to the more conventional ele- 
gances of some clever but inferior men, and the 



STOTHARD. 123 

dullness of public taste ; but it was curious to see 
how he was welcomed back as the taste grew bet- 
ter, and people began to see with the eyes of his 
early patrons. The variety^ as well as grace, of 
his productions soon put him at the head of de- 
signers for books, and there he remained. What 
he did for the poems of Mr. Rogers is well known, 
and his picture of the Canterbury Pilgrims still 
better, though it was not one of his best. Many 
of his early designs for " Robinson Crusoe " and 
other works, especially those in the old " Novelist's 
Magazine," far surpass it ; and so do others in 
Bell's "British Poets." There is a female figure 
bending toward an angel, in one of the volumes 
of Chaucer in that edition, which Raphael himself 
might have put in his portfolio ; and the same 
may be said of larger designs for editions of Mil- 
ton and Shakespeare. See, in particular, those 
from " Comus," and for the " Two Gentlemen of 
Verona," where there is a girl in boy's clothes. 
Nothing can be more true or exquisite than the 
little doubtful gesture of fear and modesty in the 
latter figure, blushing at the chance of detection. 
Stothard excelled in catching these fugitive expres- 
sions of feeling — one of the rarest of all beauties. 
But he has left hundreds, perhaps thousands, of 
designs — rich treasures for the collector and the 
student. He is one of the few English artists 
esteemed on the Continent, where his productions 
are bought up like those of his friend Flaxman, 



124 TABLE-TALK. 

who may be reckoned among his imitators ; for 
Stothard's genius was richer than his, and in- 
cluded it. 

THE COUISTTENANOE AFTER DEATH. 

A corpse seems as if it suddenly knew every- 
thing, and was profoundly at peace in conse- 
quence. 

HUME. 

Hume, the most unphilosophic (in some re- 
spects) of all philosophic historians, and a bigoted 
enemy of bigotry (that is to say, unable to give 
candid accounts of those whom he differed with 
on certain points), was a good-natured, easy man 
in personal intercourse, dispassionate, not ungen- 
erous, and could do people kind and considerate 
services. Out of the pale of sentiment, and of 
what may be called the providential and possible, 
he was an unanswerable, or at least an unanswered 
dialectician ; but there was a whole world in that 
region into which he had no insight ; and for 
want of it he was not qualified to pronounce 
finally on matters of faith and religion. 

GIBBOK 

Gibbon was a skeptic, in some respects, of a 
similar kind with Hume, and more immersed in 
the senses. I say "more," because both these 



ANGELS AND FLOWERS. 125 

anti-spiritual philosophers were fat, double-chinned 
men. Perhaps Gibbon's life was altogether a lit- 
tle too selfish, and lapped up in cotton. He lum- 
bered from his bed to his board, and back again, 
with his books in the intervals, or rather divided 
his time between the three, in a sort of swinish- 
ness of scholarship. Martyrdom and he were at 
a pretty distance ! He was not a man to die of 
public spirit, or to comprehend very well those 
who did. But his skepticism tended to promote 
toleration. He was an admirable Latin scholar, a 
punctilious historian, an interesting writer in spite 
of a bad style ; and his faults, of every kind, ap- 
pear to have been owing to temperament and dis- 
ease, and to his having been an indulged infant, 
and heir to an easy fortune. Let us be thankful 
we got so much out of him, and that so diseased 
a body got so much out of life. A wi^iter's in- 
firmities are sometimes a reader's gain. If Gib- 
bon had not disliked so much to go out of doors, 
we might not have had the " Decline and Fall." 

ANGELS AND FLOWERS. 

It might be fancied that the younger portion 
of angels — the childhood of heaven — had had a 
part assigned them in the creation of the world, 
and that they made the flowers. 

Linnaeus, however, would have differed on this 
point. 



126 TABLE-TALK. 

AN ENVIABLE DISTRESS. 

Mr. Rogers, according to the newspapers, has 
been robbed of plate by his footman to the amount 
of two thousand pounds. What a beautiful ca- 
lamity for a poet ! to be able to lose two thou- 
sand pounds ! 

SIR THOMAS DYOT. 

The street lately called Dyot Street, in St. 
Giles's, is now christened (in defiance, we believe, 
of a legal proviso to the contrary) George Street. 
It is understood that Sir Thomas Dyot, an admi- 
rable good fellow in the reign of the Stuarts, left 
his property in this street for the use and resort 
of the houseless poor who "had not where to lay 
their heads," upon condition of its retaining his 
name ; and how the parish authorities came to 
have a right to alter the name his admirers would 
like to know. 

It is a singular instance of the effect of circum- 
stances in human affairs, that a name so excellent, 
and worthy to be had in remembrance, should be- 
come infamous in connection with this very street ; 
and perhaps the authorities might undertake to 
vindicate themselves on that score, and ask wheth- 
er Sir Thomas could have calculated upon such a 
vicissitude ? But I say he could, and very likely 
did ; for he knew of what sort of people the 
houseless poor were likely to be composed ; and 



ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE. 127 

he was prepared, like a thorough-gomg friend, to 
take all chances with them, and trust to more 
reflecting times to do justice both to him and to 
them. 

Or, if he did not think of all this, his instinct 
did ; or, at all events, it did not care for anything 
but playing the kind and manly part, and letting 
a wise Providence do the rest. Sir Thomas was 
a right hearty good fellow, whoever he was ; for 
nothing else, I believe, is known of him ; — a little 
wild, perhaps, in his youth ; otherwise he might 
not have become acquainted with the wants of 
such people ; but ever, be sure, honest to the 
backbone, and a right gentleman — fit companion 
for the Dorsets and Cowleys in their old age, not 
for the Charles the Seconds. Here's a libation to 
him in this dip of ink — in default of a bumper Of 
Burgundy. 

ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE. 

One has little sympathy after all with the 
virtues or failings of illustrious Greeks and Ro- 
mans. One fancies that it was their business to 
be heroical, and to furnish examples for school- 
themes — owing, perhaps, to the formality and 
tiresomeness of those themes. We leave then 
the practice and glory of their virtues as things 
ancient and foreign to us, like their garments, or 
fit only to be immortalized in stone — petrifactions 
of ambitious ethics, not flesh and blood, or next- 



128 TABLE-TALK. 

door neighbors ; stars for the sky, not things of 
household warmth and comfort ; not feasible 
virtues — or, if feasible, rendered alien somehow 
by distance and strangeness, and perhaps accom- 
panied by vices which we are hardly sorry to 
meet with, and which our envy (and something 
better) converts into reconcilements of their vir- 
tue ; as when we hear, for example, that old Cato 
drank, or that Phocion said an arrogant thing on 
"the hustings," or that Numa (as a Frenchman 
would say) visited a pretty girl " of afternoons " 
— Ma'amselle Egerie — who, he pretended, was a 
goddess and an oracle, and gave him thoughts on 
legislation. So, of the professed men of pleasure 
in the ancient world — or indeed of professed men 
of pleasure at any time (for their science makes 
them remote and peculiar, a sort of body apart, ex- 
cessively Free Masons) — one doesn't think one's 
self bound to resemble them. Their example is 
not pernicious, much less of any use for the at- 
tainment of actual pleasure. Who thinks of imi- 
tating the vices of Caesar or Alexander, out of an 
ambition of universality ? (what a preposterous fop 
would he be !) or stopping to drink and carouse 
when he ought to be moving onward, because 
Hannibal did it ? or of being a rake because Alci- 
biades had a reputation of that sort (unless, per- 
haps, it be some one of our lively ultra-classical 
neighbors, whose father has indiscreetly chris- 
tened him Aleibiade^ and who studies Greek beauty 



ANCIENT AND MODERN EXAMPLE. 129 

in a ballet) ? We do not think of imitating men in 
Greek helmets or the Roman toga. Their exam- 
ple is only for school-exercises, or to be brought 
forward in the speech of some virgin orator. 
We must have heroism in a hat and boots, and 
good-fellowship at a modern table. It is our ev- 
ery-day names, Smith, Jones, and Robinson, that 
must be instanced for an example which we can 
thoroughly feel. Has Thompson done a handsome 
action ? Everybody cries, " What a good fellow 
is Thompson ! " Is a living man of wit effeminate 
and a luxurious liver ? The example becomes 
perilous. It is no remote infection, no " Plague 
of Athens." The disease is next door — a pesti- 
lence that loungeth at noon — a dandy cholera. 

Nobody cares much for Paetus and Arria, and 
the fine example they set. Those Romans seem 
bound to have set them, for the benefit of the 
" Selectee e Prof anis " and the publications of Mr. 
Valpy. Lucretia sits " alone in her glory," a kind 
of suicide-statue — too hard of example to be fol- 
lowed. We can not think, somehow, that she felt 
much, except as a personage who should one day 
be in the classical dictionaries. And Portia's ap- 
pears an odd and unfeeling taste, who swallowed 
" burning coals," instead of having a proper wo- 
manly faint, and taking a glass of water. 

But tell us of " Mrs. Corbet " (celebrated by 
Pope), who heroically endured the cancer that 
killed her, and we understand the thing. Re- 
9 



130 TABLE-TALK. 

count us a common sm'gical case of a man who 
has his leg cut off without wincing ; and, as we 
are no farther off than St. Bartholomew's Hospi- 
tal, it comes home to us. Tell us what a good 
fellow Thomson the poet was, or how Quin took 
him out of a spunging-house with a hundred 
pounds, or how Johnson " loved to dine," or Cow- 
per solaced his grief with flowers and verses, and 
we all comprehend the matter perfectly, and are 
incited to do likewise. 



MILTON AISTD HIS POETEAITS. 

There can be little doubt that Milton, however 
estimable and noble at heart, was far from being 
perfect in his notions of household government. 
He exacted too much submission to be loved as 
he wished. His wife (which was a singular pro- 
ceeding in the bride of a young poet) absented 
herself from him in less than a month after their 
marriage — that is to say, during the very honey- 
moon ; and she staid away the whole summer 
with her relations. He made his daughters read 
to him in languages which they did not under- 
stand ; and in one part of his works he piques 
himself, like Johnson^ on being a good hater. 
Now, '^ good haters," as they call themselves, are 
sometimes very good men, and hate out of zeal 
for something they love ; neither would we un- 
dervalue the services which such haters may have 



WILLIAM HAY. 131 

done mankind. They may have been necessary ; 
though a true Christian philosophy proposes to 
supersede them, and certainly does not recom- 
mend them. But as all men have their faults, so 
these men are not apt to have the faults that are 
least disagreeable, even to one another ; for it is ob- 
servable that good haters are far from loving their 
brethren, the good haters on the other side ; and 
their tempers are apt to be infirm and overbearing. 
In the most authentic portraits of Milton, venerate 
them as one must, it is difficult not to discern a 
certain uneasy austerity — a peevishness — a blight 
of something not sound in opinion and feeling. 

WILLIAM HAY. 

Hay, the author of an " Essay on Deformity," 
was a member of Parliament, and an adherent, 
but not a servile one, to the government of Sir 
Robert Walpole. He was author of several pub- 
lications on moral and political subjects, interest- 
ing in their day, and not unworthy of being looked 
at by posterity. He was a very amiable and be- 
nevolent man, of which his essays afford abun- 
dant evidence ; and his name is to be added to the 
list of those delightful individuals, not so rare as 
might be imagined, who surmount the disadvan- 
tages of personal exterior on the wings of beauty 
of spirit. It is observable, however, of these men, 
that they have generally fine eyes. 



132 TABLE-TALK. 

BISHOP OOEBET. 

It is related of this facetious prelate, who flour- 
ished in the time of Charles the First, and whose 
poems have survived in the collections, that, hav- 
ing been tumbled into the mud with a fat friend 
of his by the fall of a coach, he said that " Stub- 
bins was up to the elbows in mud, and he was up 
to the elbows in Stubbins." During a confirma- 
tion, he said to the country people who were press- 
ing too closely upon the ceremony, " Bear off there, 
or I'll confirm you with my staff." And another 
time, on a like occasion, having to lay his hand on 
the head of a very bald man, he turned to his 
chaplain and said, " Some dust, Lushington," to 
keep his hand from slipping. 

Corbet's constitutional vivacity vv^as so strong 
as hardly to have been compatible with episcopal 
decorum. But times and manners must be taken 
into consideration ; and, though a bishop of this 
turn of mind would have been forced, had he lived 
nov>^, to be more considerate in regard to times 
and places, there is no reason to doubt that he 
took himself for as good a churchman as he was 
an honest man. And liberties are sometimes taken 
by such men with serious objects of regard, not 
so much out of a light consideration, as from the 
confidence of love. Had Corbet lived in later 
times, he would, perhaps, have furnished as high 
an example of elegant episcopacy as any of the 



HANDEL. 133 

Bundles or Shipleys. As it was, he was a sort of 
manly college-boy, who never grew old. 

HOADLY. 

Hoadly, the son of the Bishop, and author of 
" The Suspicious Husband," was a physician, and 
a good-natured, benevolent man. His play has 
been thought as profligate as those of Congreve ; 
but there is an animal spirit in it, and a native 
undercurrent of good-feeling, very different from 
the sophistication of Congreve's fine ladies and 
gentlemen. Congreve writes like a rake upon 
system ; Hoadly like a wild-hearted youth from 
school. 

VOLTAIEE. 

Perhaps Voltaire may be briefly, and not un- 
justly, characterized as the only man who ever 
obtained a place in the list of the greatest names 
of the earth by an aggregation of secondary abil- 
ities. He was the god of cleverness. To be sure, 
he was a very great wit. 

HANDEL. 

Handel was the Jupiter of music ; nor is the 
title the less warranted from his including in his 
genius the most affecting tenderness as well as 
the most overpowering grandeur ; for the father 
of gods and men was not only a thunderer, but a 



134 TABLE-TALK. 

love-maker. Handel was the son of a physician, 
and, like Mozart, began composing for the public 
in his childhood. He was the grandest composer 
that is known to have existed, wielding, as it 
were, the choirs of heaven and earth together. 
Mozart said of him that he "struck you, when- 
ever he pleased, with a thunderbolt." His halle- 
lujahs open the heavens. He utters the word 
" Wonderful " as if all their trumpets spoke to- 
gether. And then, when he comes to earth, to 
make love amid nymphs and shepherds (for the 
beauties of all religions found room in his breast), 
his strains drop milk and honey, and his love is 
the usefulness of the Golden Age. We see his 
Acis and Galatea, in their very songs, looking one 
another in the face in all the truth and mutual 
homage of the tenderest passion ; and poor jeal- 
ous Polyphemus stands in the background, black- 
ening the scene with his gigantic despair. Chris- 
tian meekness and suffering attain their last de- 
gree of pathos in " He shall feed his flock," and 
"He was despised and rejected." We see the 
blush on the smitten cheek, mingling with the 
hair. 

Handel had a large, heavy person, and was 
occasionally vehement in his manners. He ate 
and drank too much (probably out of a false no- 
tion of supporting his excitement), and thus occa- 
sionally did harm to mind as well as body. But 
he was pious, generous, and independent, and, 



MONTAIGNE. 135 

like all great geniuses, a most thorougli lover of 
hia art, making no compromises with its demands 
and its dignity for the sake of petty conveniences. 
There is often to be found a quaintness and stiff- 
ness in his style, owing to the fashion of the day ; 
and he had not at his command the instrumenta- 
tion of the present times, which no man would 
have turned to more overwhelming account : but 
what is sweet in his compositions is surpassed 
in sweetness by no other ; and what is great, is 
greater than in any. 

MOI^TAIGNE. 

Montaigne's father, to create in him an equa- 
ble turn of mind, used to have him waked during 
his infancy with a flute. 

Montaigne was a philosopher of the material 
order, and as far-sighted perhaps that way as any 
man that ever lived, having that temperament, 
between jovial and melancholy, which is so favor- 
able for seeing fair play to human nature ; and 
his good-heartedness rendered him an enthusiastic 
friend, and a believer in the goodness of others, 
notwithstanding his insight into their follies and 
a good stock of his own ; for he lived in a coarse 
and licentious age, of the freedoms of which he 
partook. But, for want of something more imagi- 
native and spiritual in his genius, his perceptions 
stopped short of the very finest points, critical 
and philosophical. He knew little of the capabili- 



136 TABLE-TALK. 

ties of the mind, out of the pale of its more mani- 
fest influences from the body ; his taste in poetry 
was logical, not poetical ; and he ventured upon 
openly despising romances ("Amadis de Gaul," 
etc.) 5 which was hardly in keeping with the modesty 
of his motto, " Que s^ais-Je ? " (What do I know ?) 
Montaigne, who loved his father's memory, 
rode out in a cloak which had belonged to him ; 
and would say of it, that he seemed to feel 
wrapped up in his father (" il me semile m^enve- 
lopper de ?^^^"). Some writers have sneered at 
this saying, and 'at the conclusions drawn from it 
respecting the amount of his filial affection ; but 
it does him as much honor as anything he ever 
uttered. There is as much depth of feeling in it 
as vivacity of expression. 

WALLER. 

Pope said of Waller, that he would have been 
a better poet had he entertained less admiration 
of people in power. But surely it was the excess 
of that propensity which inspired him. He was 
naturally timid and servile ; and poetry is the 
flower of a man's real nature, whatever it be, pro- 
vided there be intellect and music enough to bring 
it to bear. Waller's very best pieces are those in 
praise of sovereign authority and of a disdainful 
mistress. He would not have sung Saccharissa so 
well had she favored him. 



RAPHAEL AND MICHAEL ANGELO. 137 

OTWAY. 

Otway is the poet of sensual pathos ; for, af- 
fecting as he sometimes is, he knows no way to 
the heart but through the senses. His very friend- 
ship, though enthusiastic, is violent, and has a 
smack of bullying. He was a man of generous 
temperament, spoilt by a profligate age. He seems 
to dress, up a beauty in tears, only for the purpose 
of stimulating her wrongers. 

EAPHAEL AND MICHAEL AltTGELO. 

The lovers of energy in its visible aspect think 
Michael Angelo the greatest artist that ever lived. 
Ariosto (in not one of his happiest compliments), 
punning upon his name, calls him 

"Michel, piti che mortal, Angiol diviuo." 
(Michael, the more than man, Angel divine.) 

Pursuing the allusion, it may be said that 
there is much of the same difference between him 
and Raphael as there is between their namesakes, 
the warlike archangel Michael, in "Paradise Lost," 
and Raphael, " the affable archangel." But sure- 
ly Raphael, by a little exaggeration, could have 
done all that Michael Angelo did ; whereas Mi- 
chael Angelo could not have composed himself 
into the tranquil perfection of Raphael. Rapha- 
el's gods and sibyls are as truly grand as those 



138 TABLE-TALK. 

of Buonarroti ; while tlie latter, out of an instinct 
of inferiority in intellectual and moral grandeur, 
could not help eking out the power of his with 
something of a convulsive strength — an ostenta- 
tion of muscle and attitude. His Jupiter was a 
Mars intellectualized. Raphael's was always Jupi- 
ter himself, needing nothing more, and including 
the strength of beauty in that of majesty, as true 
moral grandeur does in nature.* 

WAX AND HONEY. 

Wax-lights, though we are accustomed to 
overlook the fact, and rank them with ordinary 
commonplaces, are true fairy tapers — a white 
metamorphosis from the flowers, crowned with 
the most intangible of all visible mysteries, fire. 

Then there is honey, which a Greek poet 
would have called the sister of wax — a thing as 
beautiful to eat as the other is to look upon ; and 
beautiful to look upon, too. What two extraor- 
dinary substances to be made, by little winged 
creatures, out of roses and lilies ! What a singu- 
lar and lovely energy in nature to impel those 
little creatures thus to fetch out the sweet and 
elegant properties of the colored fragrances of 

* Since making these remarks, I have seen the bust of a 
Susannah, which, if truly attributed to Michael Angelo, proves 
him to have been the master of a sweetness of expression in- 
ferior to no man. It is indeed the perfection of loveliness. 



ASSOCIATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE. 139 

the gardens, and serve them up to us for food 
and light ! — honey to eat, and waxen tapers to 
eat it by ! What more graceful repast could be 
imagined on one of the fairy tables made by Vul- 
can, which moved of their own accord, and came 
gliding, when he wanted a luncheon, to the side 
of Apollo ! — the honey golden as his lyre, and the 
wax fair as his shoulders. Depend upon it, he 
has eaten of it many a time, chatting with Hebe 
before some Olympian concert ; and as he talked 
in an undertone, fervid as the bees, the bass- 
strings of his lyre murmured an accompaniment. 

ASSOCIATIONS WITH SHAKESPEARE. 

How naturally the idea of Shakespeare can be 
made to associate itself with anything which is 
worth mention ! Take Christmas for instance : 
" Shakespeare and Christmas " ; the two ideas 
fall as happily together as " wine and walnuts," 
or heart and soul. So you may put together 
" Shakespeare and May," or " Shakespeare and 
June," and twenty passages start into your mem- 
ory about spring and violets. Or you may say, 
" Shakespeare and Love," and you are in the 
midst of a bevy of bright damsels, as sweet as 
rose-buds ; or " Shakespeare and Death," and all 
graves, and thoughts of graves, are before you ; 
or " Shakespeare and Life," and you have the 
whole world of youth, and spirit, and Hotspur, 



140 TABLE-TALK. 

and life itself ; or you may say even, " Shalce- 
speare and Hate," and he will say all that can be 
said for hate, as well as against it, till you shall 
take Shylock himself into your Christian arms, 
and tears shall make you of one faith. 

BAD GEEAT MEN. 

There have, undoubtedly, been bad great men; 
but, inasmuch as they were bad, they were not 
great. Their greatness was not entire. There 
was a great piece of it omitted. They had heads, 
legs, and arms ; but they vv^anted hearts, and thus 
were not whole men. 

CICERO. 

This great Roman special pleader — the lawyer 
of antiquity, the child of the old age of Roman 
virtue, when words began to be taken for things 
— ^was the only man ever made great by vanity. 

FLOWERS IN WINTER. 

It is a charming sight to see China roses cover- 
ing the front of a cottage in winter-time. It looks 
as if we need have no winter, as far as flowers are 
concerned ; and, in fact, it is possible to have both 
a beautiful and a fragrant garden in January. 
There is a story in Boccaccio of a magician who 
conjured up a garden in winter-time. His magic 



CHARLES LAMB. 141 

consisted in his having a knowledge beyond his 
time ; and magic pleasures, so to speak, await on 
all who choose to exercise knoy/ledge after his 
fashion, and to realize what the progress of infor- 
mation and good taste may suggest. 

Even a garden six feet wide is better than 
none. Now the possessor of such a garden might 
show his " magic " by making the most of it, and 
filling it with color, 

CHAKLES LAMB. 

Lamb was a humanist, in the most universal 
sense of the term. His imagination was not great, 
and he also wanted sufficient heat and music to 
render his poetry as good as his prose ; but as a 
prose writer, and within the wide circuit of hu- 
manity, no man ever took a more complete range 
than he. He had felt, thought, and suffered so 
much, that he literally had intolerance for no- 
thing ; and he never seemed to have it, but when 
he supposed the sympathies of men, who might 
have known better, to be imperfect. He was a 
wit and an olt)server of the first order, as far as 
the world around him was concerned, and society 
in its existing state ; for, as to anything theoreti- 
cal or transcendental, no man ever had less care 
for it, or less power. To take him out of habit 
and convention, however tolerant he was to those 
who could speculate beyond them, was to put 



142 TABLE-TALK. 

him into an exhausted receiver, or to send him 
naked, shivering, and driven to shatters, through 
the regions of space and time. He was only at 
his ease in the old arms of humanity ; and hu- 
manity loved and comforted him like one of its 
wisest though weakest children. His life had ex- 
perienced great and peculiar sorrows ; but he 
kept up a balance between those and his consola- 
tions, by the goodness of his heart, and the ever- 
willing sociality of his humor ; though, now and 
then, as if he would cram into one moment the 
spleen of years, he would throw out a startling 
and morbid subject for reflection, perhaps in no 
better shape than a pun, for he was a great pun- 
ster. It was a levity that relieved the gravity of 
his thoughts and kept them from falling too heav- 
ily earthward. 

Lamb was under the middle size, and of fra- 
gile make, but with a head as fine as if it had 
been carved on purpose. He had a very weak 
stomach. Three glasses of wine would put him 
in as lively a condition as can only be wrought in 
some men by as many bottles ; which subjected 
him to mistakes on the part of the inconsiderate. 

Lamb's essays, especially those collected under 
the signature of Eli a, will take their place among 
the daintiest productions of English loit-melan- 
choly — an amiable melancholy being the ground- 
work of them, and serving to throw out their 
delicate flowers of wit and character with the 



SPORTING. 143 

greater nicety. Nor will they be liked the less 
for a sprinkle of old language, which was natural 
in him by reason of his great love of the old Eng- 
lish writers. Shakespeare himself might have read 
them, and Hamlet have quoted them. 

SPOKTING. 

The second of September is terrible in the an- 
nals of the French Revolution, for a massacre, 
the perpetrators of which were called Septem- 
brizers. If the birds had the settlement of alma- 
nacs, new and startling would be the list of Sep- 
tembrizers and their fusillades ; amazing the mul- 
titude of good-humored and respectable faces that 
would have to look in the glass of a compulso- 
ry self-knowledge, and recognize themselves for 
slaughterers by wholesale — or worse, distributors 
of broken bones and festering dislocations. 

" And what " (a reader may ask) " would be 
the good of that, if these gentlemen are not aware 
of their enormities ? Would it be doing anything 
but substituting one pain for another, and setting 
men's minds upon needless considerations of the 
pain which exists in the universe ? " 

Yes ; for these gentlemen are perhaps not 
quite so innocent and unconscious as, in the gra- 
tuitousness of your philosophy, you are willing to 
suppose them. Besides, should they cease to give 
pMn, they would cease to feel it in its relation to 



144 TABLE-TALK. 

themselves ; and as to the pain existing in the 
universe, people in general are not likely to feel 
it too much, especially the healthy ; nor ought 
anybody to do so, in a feeble sense, as long as he 
does what he can to diminish it, and trusts the 
rest to Providence and futurity. What we are 
incited by our own thoughts, or those of others, 
to amend, it becomes us to consider to that end : 
what we can not contribute any amendment to, 
we must think as well of as we can contrive. 
Sportsmen, for the most part, are not a very 
thoughtful generation. No harm would be done 
them by putting a little more consideration into 
their heads. On the other hand, all sportsmen 
are not so comfortable in their reflections as their 
gayety gives out ; and the moment a man finds a 
contradiction in himself between his amusements 
and his humanity, it is a signal that he should 
give them up. He will otherwise be hurting his 
nature in other respects, as well as in this ; he 
will be exasperating his ideas of his fellow crea- 
tures, of the world, of God himself ; and thus he 
Avill be inflicting pain on all sides, for the sake of 
tearing out of it a doubtful pleasure. 

" But it is effeminate to think too much of 
pain, under any circumstances." 

Yes — including that of leaving off a favorite 
pastime. 

Oh, we need not want noble pains, if we are 
desirous of them — pains of honorable endeavors. 



SPORTING. 145 

pains of generous sympathy, pains, most mascu- 
line pains, of self-denial. Are not these more 
manly, more anti-effeminate, than playing with 
life and suffering, like spoilt children, and crack- 
ing the legs of partridges ? 

Most excellent men have there been, and 
doubtless are, among sportsmen ; truly gallant 
natures, reflecting ones too ; men of fine wit and 
genius, and kind as mother's milk in all things but 
this — in all things but killing mothers because 
they are no better than birds, and leaving the 
young to starve in the nest, and strewing the 
brakes with agonies of feathered wounds. If I 
sometimes presume to think myself capable of 
teaching them better, it is only upon points of 
this nature, and because, for want of early habit 
and example, my prejudices have not been enlisted 
against my reflection. Most thankfully would I 
receive the wisdom they might be able to give 
me on all other points. But see what habit can 
do with the best natures, and how inferior ones 
may sometimes be put upon a superior ground of 
knowledge from the absence of it. Gilbert Wake- 
field I take to have been a man of crabbed nature, 
as well as confined understanding, compared with 
Fox ; yet in the public argument which he had 
with the statesman on the subject, Wakefield had 
the best of it, poorly as it was managed by him. 
The good-natured legislator could only retreat 
into vague generalities and smiling admissions, 
10 



146 TABLE-TALK. 

and hope that his correspondent would not think 
ill of him. And who does ? We love Fox al- 
ways, almost when he is on the instant of pointing 
his gun ; and we are equally inclined to quarrel 
with the tone and manner of his disputant, even 
when in the act of abasing it. But what does this 
prove, except the danger of a bad habit to the 
self -reconciling instincts of a fine enjoying nature, 
and to the example which flows from it into so 
much reconcilement to others ? "When a common 
hard-minded sportsman takes up his fowling-piece 
he is to be regarded only as a kind of wild beast 
on two legs, pursuing innocently his natural pro- 
pensities, and about to seek his prey, as a ferret 
does, or a wild cat ; but the more of a man he is, 
the more bewildered and dangerous become one's 
thoughts respecting the meeting of extremes. 
When Fox takes up the death-tube, we sophisti- 
cate for his sake, and are in hazard of becoming 
effeminate on the subject, purely to shut our eyes 
to the cruelty in it, and to let the pleasant gentle- 
man have his way. 

As to the counter-arguments about Providence 
and permission of evil, they are edge tools which 
it is nothing but presumption to play with. What 
the mind may discover in those quarters of specu- 
lation, it is impossible to assert ; but, as far as it 
has looked yet, nothing is ascertained, except that 
the circle of God's privileges is one thing, and 
that of man's another. If we knew all about pain 



M^CENAS. 147 

and evil, and their necessities, and their conse- 
quences, we might have a right to inflict them, 
or to leave them untouch 3d ; but not being pos- 
sessed of this knowledge, and on the other hand 
being gifted with doubts, and sympathies, and 
consciences, after our human fashion, we must 
give our fellow creatures the benefit of those 
doubts and consciences, and cease to assume the 
rights of gods, upon pain of becoming less than 
men. 

WISDOM OF THE HEAD AND OF THE HEART. 

The greatest intellects ought not to rank at 
the top of their species, any more than the means 
rank above the end. The instinctive wisdom of 
the heart can realize, while the all-mooting sub- 
tlety of the head is only doubting. It is a beau- 
tiful feature in the angelical hierarchy of the Jews 
that the Seraphs rank first and the Cherubs after ; 
that is to say, Love before Knowledge. 

M^OEIsrAS 

Wielded the Roman Empire with rings on his lit- 
tle finger. He deserves his immortality as a pa- 
tron of genius ; and yet he was a dandy of the 
most luxurious description amid the iron and 
marble of old Rome — the most effeminate of the 
effeminate, as Ney was " bravest of the brave." 
The secret of this weakness in a great man (for 



148 TABLE-TALK. 

great he was, both as a statesman and a discemer 
of greatness in others) was to be found in exces- 
sive weakness of constitution. 

LORD SHAFTESBURY'S EXPERIEISTCE OF 
MATRIMOISTY. 

Shaftesbury was an honest man and politician, 
an elegant but fastidious writer, and, though a 
poor critic in poetry, could discern and forcibly 
expose the errors of superstition. In one of his 
letters is an extraordinary passage, not much cal- 
culated to delight the lady whom he married. 
He said he found marriage ''not so much ivorse^^ 
than celibacy as he had expected ! He appears to 
have had but a sorrj physique. 

A PHILOSOPHER THROWN FROM HIS HORSE. 

Montaigne was one day thrown with great vio- 
lence from his horse. He was horribly knocked 
*and bruised within an inch of his life ; was cast 
into a swoon ; underwent agonies in recovering 
from it ; and all this he noted down, as it were, 
in the faint light, the torn and battered tablets of 
his memory, during the affliction ; drawing them 
forth afterward for the benefit of the reflecting. 
If you had met such a man in the streets, being 
carried along on a shutter, he would have been pro- 
viding, as well as he was able, for your instruction 
and entertainment ! This is philosophy, surely. 



MRS. SIDDONS. 149 

WOELDS OF DIFFEEENT PEOPLE. 

" The world ! " The man of fashion means 
St. James's by it ; the mere man of trade means 
the Exchange and a good prudent mistrust. But 
men of sense and imagination, whether in the 
world of fashion or trade, who use the eyes and 
faculties which God has given them, mean His 
beautiful planet, gorgeous with sunset, lovely 
with green fields, magnificent with mountains — 
a great rolling energy, full of health, love, and 
hope, and fortitude, and endeavor. Compare this 
world with the others. The men of fashion's is 
no better than a billiard-ball ; the money-getter's 
than a musty plum, 

MRS. SIDDOIvTS 

Was a person more admirable than charming, and 
not even ^o perfectly admirable on the stage as the 
prevalence of an artificial style of acting in her 
time induced her worshipers to suppose. She was 
a grand and effective actress, never at a loss, and 
equal to any demands of the loftier parts of pas- 
sion ; but her grandeur was rather of the queen- 
like and conventional order, than of the truly 
heroical. There was a lofty spirit in it, but a 
spirit not too lofty to take stage-dignity for the 
top of its mark. Mrs. Siddons was born and bred 
up in the profession, one of a family of actors, and 
the daughter of a mother of austere manners. 



150 TABLE -TALE. 

Mr. Campbell, in his Life of her, somewhat 
quaintly called her "the Great Woman"; but 
I know not in what respect she was particularly- 
great as to womanhood. It was queenhood^ not 
womanhood, that was her forte — professional 
greatness ; not that aggregation of gentle and 
generous qualities, that union of the sexually 
charming and the dutifully noble, which makes 
up the idea of perfection in the woman. 

Great women belong to history and to self- 
sacrifice, not to the annals of a stage, however 
dignified. Godiva gives us the idea of a great 
woman. So does Edward I.'s queen, who sucked 
the poison out of his arm. So does Abelard's He- 
loise, loving with all her sex's fondness as long 
as she could, and able, for another's sake, to re- 
nounce the pleasures of love for the worship of the 
sentiment. Pasta, with her fine, simple manner 
and genial person, may be supposed the represent- 
ative of a great woman. The greatness is rela- 
tive to the womanhood. It only partakes that of 
the man, inasmuch as it carries to its height what 
is gentle and enduring in both sexes. The mo- 
ment we recognize anything of what is understood 
by the word masculine in a woman (not in the 
circumstances into which she is thrown, but in 
herself or aspect), her greatness, in point of wo- 
manhood, is impaired. She should hereafter, as 
Macbeth says, "bring forth men-children only." 
Mrs. Siddons's extraordinary theory about Lady 



NON-NECESSITY OF GOOD WORDS TO MUSIC. 151 

Macbeth (that she was a fragile little being, very 
feminine to look at) was an instinct to this effect, 
repellent of the association of ideas which people 
would form betwixt her and her personation of 
the character. 

Mrs. Siddons's refinement was not on a par with 
her loftiness. I remember in the famous sleeping- 
scene in ''Macbeth," when she washed her hands 
and could not get the blood off, she made " a face" 
in passing them under her nose, as if she perceived 
a foul scent, Now, she ought to have shuddered 
and looked in despair, as recognizing the stairt on 
her souL^ 

NOiSr-NEOESSITY OF GOOD WORDS TO MUSIC. 

Music is an art that in its union with words in 
general may reasonably take, I think, the higher 
place, inferior as it is to poetry in the abstract. 
For when music is singing, the finest part of our 
senses takes the place of the more definite intel- 
lect, and nothing surely can surpass the power of 
an affecting and enchanting air in awakening the 
very flower of emotion. On this account, I can 
well understand a startling saying attributed to 
the great Mozart, that he did not care for having 
good words to his music. He wanted only the 

* This trait of character has been mentioned in my " Auto- 
biography " ; but I leave it standing, partly for the sake of 
completing a sketch. 



152 TABLE-TALK. 

names (as it were) of the passions. His own 
poetry supplied the rest. 

GOETHE. 

If I may judge of Goethe from the beautiful 
translations of him by Shelley, Carlyle, Anster, 
and others, he had a subtile and sovereign imagi- 
nation, was a master in criticism, was humane, 
universal, reconciling, a noble casuist, a genuine 
asserter of first principles, wise in his generation, 
and yet possessing the wisdom of the children of 
light. Nevertheless, it is a question whether any 
man daring to think and speculate as he has done, 
would have been treated with so much indul- 
gence, if worldly power had not taken him under 
its wing, and had he not shown too conventional 
a taste for remaining there, and falling in with 
one of its most favored opinions. Goethe main- 
tained that the great point for society to strain at 
was not to advance (in the popular sense of that 
word), but to be content with their existing con- 
dition, and to labor contentedly every man in his 
vocation. His conclusion, I think, is refuted by 
the simple fact of the existence of hope and en- 
deavor in the nature of men. If society is deter- 
mined never to be satisfied, still it v/ill hope to be 
so ; the hope itself may, for aught that can be 
affirmed to the contrary, be a mere part of the 
work — of the necessary impulse to activity ; but 
there it is — now working harder than ever — and 



GOETHE. 153 

a thousand Goethes can not destroy, though they 
may daunt it. They must destroy hope itself 
first, and life, and death too (which is continually 
renewing the ranks of the hopeful and the young), 
and above all the press, which will never stop till 
it has shaken the world more even. 

It was easy for a man in Goethe's position to 
recommend people to be content with their own. 
But to be content with some positions is to be 
superior to them ; and yet Goethe after all, in his 
own person, was neither superior to, nor content 
with, the conventionalities which he found made 
for him. He did not marry the woman he lived 
with till circumstances, as he thought, compelled 
him ; and this was late in life. And instead of 
being superior to his condition, as he recommend- 
ed the poor and struggling to be, his very acqui- 
escence in other conventionalities showed hoy/ lit- 
tle he was so. If this great universalist proved 
his superiority by condescension, it was at any 
rate by contracting his wings and his views into 
the court circle, and feathering an agreeable nest 
which he never gave up. Unluckily for the repu- 
tation of his impartiality, all his worldly advan- 
tages were on the side of his theory. It is, there- 
fore, impossible to show that it was anything else 
but a convenient acquiescence. He hazarded no- 
thing to prove it otherwise ; though, in the in- 
stance of his non-marriage, he showed how will- 
ing he was to depart from it where the hazard 



154 TABLE-TALK. 

was not too great. In England, he would have 
married sooner, or departed from his acquies- 
cences more. 

Goethe, on account of this opinion of his, and 
the position which he occupied, is not popular at 
present in Germany. The partisans of advance 
there do not like him, perhaps from a secret feel- 
ing that they are more theoretical than practical 
themselves, and that in this respect he has repre- 
sented his native country too well. For honest 
Germany, perhaps because she is more material 
than she supposes, and has unwittingly acquired 
a number of charities and domesticities from a 
certain sensual bonhomie^ which has given her 
more to say for herself in that matter than she 
or her transcendentalists would like to own, is far 
more contemplative than active in her politics, 
and willing enough to let other nations play the 
game of advancement, as long as she can eat, 
drink, and dream, without any very violent inter- 
ruption to her self-complacency. Pleasant and 
harmless may she live, with beau ideals (and very 
respectable ones they are) in the novels of Augus- 
tus La Fontaine ; and may no worse fate befall 
the rest of the world, if it is to get no farther. 
Much of it has not got half so far. Her great 
poet, who partook of the same bonhomie to an ex- 
tent which he would have thought unbecoming 
his dignity to confess, even as a partaker of good 
things, " let the cat out of the bag " in this matter a 



GOETHE. 155 

little too ingenuously ; and for this, and the court 
airs they thought he gave himself, his country- 
men will not forgive him. It is easy for his whole- 
sale admirers, especially for the great understand- 
ings among them (Mr. Carlyle, for instance), to 
draw upon all the possibilities of an abstract phi- 
losophy, and give a superfine unworldly reason for 
whatever he did ; but we must take even great 
poets as we find them. Shakespeare himself did 
not escape the infection of a sort of livery servi- 
tude among the great (for actors were but a little 
above that condition in his time). With all his 
humanity, he finds it diflScult to repress a certain 
tendency to browbeat the people from behind the 
chairs of his patrons ; and though Goethe, living 
in a freer age, seldom indulges in this scornful 
mood (for it seems he is not free from it), yet it 
is impossible to help giving a little scorn for scorn, 
or at least smile for smile, when we see the poeti- 
cal minister of state, with his inexperience of half 
the ills of life, his birth, his money, his strength, 
beauty, prosperity, and a star on each breast of 
his coat, informing us with a sort of patriarchal 
dandyism, or as Bonaparte used to harangue from 
his throne, that he is contented with the condition 
of his subjects and his own — ^'France et moV — 
and that we have nothing to do but to be good 
people and "cobblers, and content ourselves with a 
thousandth part of what it would distress him to 
miss. 



. 156 TABLE-TALK. 

BACON AND JAMES THE FIRST. 

Bacon, in the exordium of his " Advancement 
of Learning," has expressed so much astonishment 
at the talents of King James the First (consider- 
ing that he was " not only a king, but a king 
born"), that the panegyric has been suspected to 
be a "bold irony." I am inclined to think other- 
wise. Bacon was a born courtier, as well as phi- 
losopher ; and even his philosophy, especially in 
a man of his turn of mind, might have found sub- 
tle reasons for venerating a being who was in 
possession of a good portion of the power of this 
earth. 

GOLDSMITH'S LIFE OF BEAU NASH. 

ISTash is to be added to the list of long livers ; 
and it is worthy of notice that vfhat has been in- 
variably observed of long livers, and appears (with 
temperance or great exercise) to be the only inva- 
riable condition of their longevity, has not failed 
in his instance : he was an early riser. 

It has been doubted whether Goldsmith was 
the author of the "Life" attributed to him. I 
think, however, it bears strong internal marks of 
his hand, though not in its happiest or most con- 
fident moments. Its pleasantry is uneasy and over- 
done, as if conscious of having got into company 
unfit for it ; and something of the tawdriness of 
the subject sticks to him — perhaps from a secret 



JULIUS C^SAR. 157 

tendency of his own to mix up the external charac- 
ter of the fine gentleman, '' in a blossom-colored 
coat," with his natural character as a writer. Chal- 
mers, the compiler of the " Biographical Dictiona- 
ry," who was much in the secrets of book-making, 
appears to have had no doubt on the subject. It 
is not improbable that Goldsmith had materials 
for the " Life," by some other person, put into his 
hands, and so made it up by touches of his own, 
and by altering the composition. 

JULIUS O^SAR. 

Caesar was one of the greatest men that ever 
lived, as far as a man's greatness can be estimated 
from his soldiership, and general talents, and per- 
sonal aggrandizement. He had the height of 
genius in the active sense, and was not without it 
in the contemplative. He was a captain, a writer, 
a pleader, a man of the world, all in the largest as 
well as most trivial points of view, and superior 
to all scruples, except those which tended to the 
enlargement of his fame, such as clemency in con- 
quest. Whether he was a very great man in the 
prospective, universal, and most enduring sense, 
as a man of his species, instead of a man of his 
time, is another question, which must be settled 
by the growing lights of the world and by future 
ages. He put an end to his country's freedom, 
and did no good, that I am aware of, to any one 



158 TABLE-TALK. 

but himself, unless by tbe production or preven- 
tion of results known only to Providence. 

FfiNELOIsr. 

Fenelon was a marvel of a man — a courtier yet 
independent, a teacher of royalty who really did 
teach, a liberal devotee, a saint in polite life. His 
" Telemachus " is not a fine poem, as some call it, 
but it is a beautiful moral novel. He had the 
courage to advise Louis XIV. not to marry the 
bigot Maintenon ; and such was the respect borne 
to his character by the Duke of Marlborough and 
the other allied generals, that they exempted his 
lands at Cambray from pillage, when in possession 
of that part of Flanders. The utmost fault that 
could be found Avith him was, that perhaps the 
vanity attributed to Frenchmen found some last 
means of getting into a corner of his nature, in 
the shape of an over-studiousness of the feelings 
of others, and an apostolical humility of submis- 
sion to the religious censures of the Pope. Charm- 
ing blights, to be sure, in the character of a Cath- 
olic priest. The famous Lord Peterborough said 
of him, in his lively manner : " He was a delicious 
creature. I was obliged to get away from him, 
or he would have made me pious." 

SPENSER AISTD THE MONTH OF AUGUST. 
The word August deserves to have the accent 
taken off the first syllable and thrown upon the 



SPENSER AND THE MONTH OF AUGUST. 159 

second (Augtist), not because the month was 
named after Augtistus (and yet he had a good 
deal of poetry in him too, considering he was a 
man of the world; his friend Virgil gives him even 
a redeeming link with the seasons), but because 
the month is truly an augtist month ; that is to 
say, increasing in splendor till it fills its orb — 
majestic, ample, of princely beneficence — clothed 
with harvest as with a garment, full-faced in 
heaven with its moon. 

Spenser, in his procession of the months, has 
painted him from a thick and lustrous palette : 

'' The sixt was August, being rich arrayed 
In garment all of gold^ doicne to the ground,'''^ 

How true the garment is made by the familiar 
words '' all of gold " ! and with what a masterly 
feeling of power, luxuriance, and music, the ac- 
cent is thrown on the word " down " ! Let no- 
body read a great poet's verses either in a trivial 
or affected manner, but with earnest yet deliberate 
love, dwelling on every beauty as he goes. And 
pray let him very much respect his stops : 

" In garment all of gold \—downe to the ground. 

" Yet rode he not, but led a lovely maid 
Fortli by the lily hand^ the which was crowned 
With ears of corn ; — and full her hand was found." 

Here is a presentation for you, beyond all the 
presentations at court — August, in his magnifi- 



160 TABLE-TALK. 

cent drapery of cloth of gold, issuing forth, and 
presenting to earth and skies his Maiden with the 
lily hand, the highest bred of all the daughters of 
Heaven — Justice. For so the poet continues : 

** That was the righteous Virgin, which of old 
Liv'd here on earth, and plenty made abound ; 
But after Wrong was lov'd, and Justice sold, 
She left th' unrighteous earth, and was to heav'n ex- 
toll'd." 

Extolled ; that is, in the learned, literal sense, 
raised out of — taken away out of a sphere un- 
worthy of her. Ex^ out of ; and tollo^ to lift. 

Many of Spenser's quaintest words are full of 
this learned beauty, triumphing over the difficulty 
of rhyme ; nay, forcing the obstacle to yield it a 
double measure of significance, as we see in the 
instance before us ; for the praise given to Jus- 
tice is here implied, as well as the fact of her 
apotheosis. She is, by means of one word, ex- 
tolled in the literal sense, that is to say, raised 
ujJ ; and she is extolled in the metaphorical sense, 
which means, praised and hymned. 

ADVICE. 

The great secret of giving advice successfully 
is to mix up with it something that implies a real 
consciousness of the adviser's own defects, and as 
much as possible of an acknowledgment of the 
other party's merits. Most advisers sink both 



ECLIPSES, HUMAN BEINGS, ETC. 161 

the one and the other ; and hence the failure 
which they meet with, and deserve. 

ECLIPSES, HUMAN" BEIINGS, AND THE LOWER 
CREATION. 

I once noticed a circumstance during an eclipse 
of the sun, which afforded a striking instance of 
the difference between humankind and the lower 
animal creation. The eclipse was so great (it was 
in the year 1820) that night-time seemed coming 
on ; birds went to roost ; and, on its clearing 
away, the cocks crew as if it was morning. At 
the height of the darkness, while all the people in 
the neighborhood were looking at the sun, I cast 
my eyes on some cattle in a meadow, and they 
were all as intently bent with their faces to the 
earth, feeding. They knew no more of the sun 
than if there had been no such thing in existence. 

Two reflections struck me on this occasion : 
First, what a comment it was on the remarks of 
Sallust and Ovid, as to the prone appetites of 
brutes [phedientia ventri) and the heavenward 
privilege of the eyes of man {coeliim tueri) ; and, 
second (as a corrective to the pride of that reflec- 
tion), how probable it was that there were things 
within the sphere of our own world of which 
humankind were as unaware as the cattle, for 
want of still finer perceptions ; things, too, that 
might settle Avorlds of mistake at a glance, and 
11 



162 TABLE-TALK. 

undo some of our gravest, perhaps absurdest, 
conclusions. 

This second reflection comes to nothing, ex- 
cept as a lesson of modesty. Not so the fine 
lines of the poet, which are an endless pleasure. 
How grand they are ! — 

^' Pronaque cum spectent animalia caetera terrain, 
Os homini sublime dedit, coelumque taeri 
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus." 

Even Dryden's translation falls short, except in 
one epithet suggested by his creed : 

*^ Thus, while the mute creation downward bend 
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, 
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes 
Beholds his own hereditary skies." 

This is good ; and the last line is noble, both in 
structure and idea ; but the phrase " man looks 
aloft," simple and strong as it is, is not so fine as 
man gifted with the " sublime countenance " ; 
and " hereditary skies " conveys a modern belief 
not true to the meaning. The Pagaus, you know, 
believed that men went into their heaven down- 
ward — into Elysium. " The Maker," says Ovid, 
" gave man a sublime coimteftiance " (that is to say, 
in both senses of the word, " elevated " ; for we 
must here take the literal and metaphorical mean- 
ing together), " and bade him contemplate the 
sky, and lift his erected visage toward the stars,^^ 
Do not read, with some editions, " coelumque 



EASTER-DAY AND THE SUN— ENGLISH POETRY. 163 

videre,'^ which means to "see," and nothing more ; 
but " ccelumque tuerij'^ which means to see with 
" intuition " — with the mind. 

EASTER-DAY AOT) THE SUN, AND ENGLISH 
POETRY. 

It was once a popular belief, and a very pretty- 
one, that the sun danced on Easter-day. Suckling 
alludes to it in his famous ballad : 

*' Her feet beneath her petticoat, 
Like little mice stole in and out, 

As if they feared the light ; 
But, oh ! she dances such a way, 
No sun upon an Easter-day 

Is half so fin^a sight." 

It is a pity that we have, if not more such beliefs, 
yet not more such poetry to stand us instead of 
them. Our poetry, like ourselves, has too little 
animal spirits. It has plenty of thought and im- 
agination ; plenty of night-thoughts, and day- 
thoughts too ; and in its dramatic circle a world 
of action and character. It is a poetry of the 
highest order and the greatest abundance. But, 
though not somber — though manly, hearty, and 
even luxuriant — it is certainly not a very joyous 
poetry. And the same may be said of our litera- 
ture in general. You do not conceive the writers 
to have been cheerful men. They often recom- 
mend cheerfulness, but rather as a good and sen- 



164 TABLE-TALK. 

sible practice than as something which they feel 
themselves. They have plenty of wit and humor, 
but more as satirists and observers than merry 
fellows. Addison was stiff, Swift unhappy, Chau- 
cer always looking on the ground. 

The fault is national, and therefore it may be 
supposed that we have no great desire to mend it. 
Such pleasure as may be wanting we take out in 
sulks. 

But at more reasonable moments, or over our 
wine, when the blood moves with a vivacity more 
southern, we would fain see the want supplied — 
fain have a little more Farquhar, and Steele, and 
Tristram Shandy. 

Cast your eyes down any list of English writers, 
such, for instance, as that ftt the end of Mr. Craik's 
" History of our Literature," and almost the only 
names that strike you as belonging to personally 
cheerful men are Beaumont and Fletcher, Suck- 
ling, Fielding, Farquhar, Steele, O'Keef e, Andrew 
Marvell, and Sterne. That Shakespeare was cheer- 
ful I have no doubt, for he was almost everything ; 
but still it is not his predominant characteristic, 
which is thought. Sheridan could " set the table 
in a roar," but it was a flustered one at somebody's 
expense. His wit wanted good nature. Prior has 
a smart air, like his cap ; but he was a rake who 
became cynical. He wrote a poem in the charac- 
ter of Solomon, on the vanity of all things. Few 
writers make you laugh more than Peter Pindar, 



THE riYE-POUND NOTE AND THE GENTLEMAN. 165 

but there was a spice of the blackguard in him. 
You could not be sure of his truth or his good 
Will. 

After all, it is not necessary to be cheerful in 
order to give a great deal of delight ; nor would 
the cheerfulest men interest us as they do if they 
were incapable of sympathizing with melancholy. 
I am only speaking of the rarity of a certain kind 
of sunshine in our literature, and expressing a 
natural, rainy-day wish that we had a little more 
of it. It ought to be collected. There should be 
a joyous set of elegant extracts — a " Literatura 
Hilaris " or " Gaudens " — in a score of volumes, 
that we could have at hand, like a cellaret of good 
wine, against April or November weather. Field- 
ing should be the port, and Farquhar the cham- 
pagne, and Sterne the malmsey ; and whenever 
the possessor cast an eye on his stock he should 
know that he had a choice draught for himself af- 
ter a disappointment, or for a friend after dinner — 
some cordial extract of Parson Adams, or Plume, 
or Uncle Toby, generous as heart could desire, 
and as wholesome for it as laughter for the lungs. 

THE FIVE-POUKD N'OTE AND THE GENTLE- 
MAN. 

It is a curious evidence of the meeting of ex- 
tremes, and of the all-searching eyes of those tre- 
mendous luminaries the daily papers, that a man 



166 TABLE-TALK. 

nowadays can not commit tlie shabbiest action in 
a corner, or hug himself never so much upon his 
cunning and privacy, but the next morning Ife 
shall stand a good chance of having it blazoned 
to the world. An instance occurred the other 
day. The porter of a house in Conduit Street 
picked up a five-pound note. A gentleman met 
him, who asked if he had seen such a thing. He 
said he had, gave it up, and was thanked with " a 
nod." The gentleman, retracing his steps, was 
accompanied awhile by the porter ; and the latter, 
mustering up his courage, inquired if he did not 
think the circumstance worth a pot of beer. The 
gentleman (for this, his title, is judiciously re- 
peated by the newspaper) made no other reply 
than by walking off to the other side of the street, 
" evidently satisfied," says the account, " that he 
was nothing out of pocket by losing his five-pound 
note." 

If this man did not see the porter pick up the 
note, he is one of the shabbiest fellows on record ; 
and if he did, he might as well have given him 
something in the gayety of his heart, if only by 
way of showing that all was right on both sides. 

But was he able to give anything ? Could he 
find it in his heart to disburse the f ourpence ? 
Was it within the compass of his volition ? For, 
after one's first feeling of disgust, a poor devil 
like this, who can not say his groat's his own, has 
a right to a humane consideration. People are 



THE FIVE-POUJ^D NOTE AND THE GENTLEMAN. 167 

apt to imagine that anybody who has f ourpence 
to spare, has nothing to do but to put his hand in 
his pocket and give it. 

B, So he can, if he chooses. 

A. Ay ; but he can't choose. 

-B. CanH choose ; oh, that is a phrase. You 
don't mean to say it literally ? 

A, Yes, I do. He is literally unable to choose. 
He can not choose if he would. The assertion is 
odd, and seems not very provable ; but it may be 
illustrated, and proved too, I think, in a manner 
easy enough. Suppose a man has a paralysis of 
the arm, and can not lift it ? You request him to 
lift it ; but he can not do so. He is physically 
unable. Morally, he wishes to do it ; he would 
choose it ; he thinks himself a poor creature for 
the inability ; but the act is out of his power. 
Now, there are cases in which the moral power is 
in a like miserable condition. Victims of opium 
have been known to be unable to will themselves 
out of the chair in which they were sitting ; and 
victims of miserliness, in like manner, may be un- 
able to will a penny out of their pockets. Their 
volition has a paralysis ; and they can no more 
stir a finger of it than your man with the para- 
lytic arm. 

PAISIELLO. 

Paisiello was one of the most beautiful melo- 
dists in the world, as the airs of " La Rachelina " 



168 TABLE-TALK. 

and " lo sono Lindoro " would be sufficient to 
testify, if he had left us none of all his others. 
Those two are well known to the English public 
under the titles of " Whither, my Love," and 
" For Tenderness formed." But they who wish 
to know how far a few single notes can go in 
reaching the depths of the heart, should hear the 
song of poor Nina, " II mio ben," in the opera of 
'' Nina pazza per Amore." The truth and beauty 
of passion can not go further. 

I admire the rich accompaniments of the Ger- 
mans ; but more accompaniment than the author 
has given to that song would be like hanging an 
embroidered robe on the shoulders of Ophelia. 

CAEDINAL ALBERONI. 

Alberoni was the son of a gardener, and lived 
to the age of eighty-seven, sound in his faculties 
to the last. He said a thing remarkable for its 
address and fine taste ; nobler, indeed, than he 
was probably aware of ; and a lesson of the very 
highest theosophy. He was a man of vehement 
temper, as well as open discourse, and told a boy 
one day, who said he feared something, that he 
should " fear nothing, not even God himself." 

The company looking shocked and astonished 
to hear such words from the mouth of a cardinal, 
Alberoni added, with a meek air and a softened 
voice, "For we are to feel nothing toward the 
good God but foy^." 



SIR WILLIAM PETTY THE STATIST, ETC. 169 

SIR WILLIAM PETTY THE STATIST AND ME- 
CHANICAL PHILOSOPHER. 

Sir William Petty was the son of a clothier, 
and was founder of the wealth, perhaps of the 
talent, of the Lansdowne family, who bear his 
name — their ancestor, the Earl of Kerry, having 
married his daughter. Sir William was a sort of 
Admirable Crichton in money-making ; and he 
left a curious account of his accomplishments that 
way. Aubrey, who knew him, says that he had at 
one time been a shop-boy ; and that while he was 
studying physic at Paris he was driven to such 
straits for a subsistence that " he lived a week or 
two on threepenny worth of walnuts." 

Sir William was a physician, a surveyor, a 
member of Parliament, a timber-merchant, a po- 
litical writer, a speculator in iron-works, fisheries, 
and lead-mines ; and he wrote Latin verses, and 
was an active Fellow of the Royal Society.* But 
for the particulars of his money-getting see his 
will, which is a curious specimen of a man of his 
sort, not always such a perfection of human wis- 
dom as he seems to have supposed, but admu^able 
for ingenuity and perseverance. He also appears 
to have been a wag and a buffoon ! He " will 
preach extempore incomparably," says Aubrey, 
" either in the Presbyterian way. Independent, 
Capuchin friar, or Jesuit." 

The same writer tells a pleasant story of him : 



170 TABLE-TALK. 

" Sir Thirom Sankey, one of Oliver Cromwell's 
knights, challenged Petty to fight with him. Pet- 
ty was extremely short-sighted, and, being the 
ehallengee, it belonged to him to nominate place 
and weapon. He nominated, accordingly, a dark 
cellar and a carpenter's axe. This," says Aubrey, 
^^ turned the knight's challenge into ridicule, and 
it came to naught." 

NAME OF LI]sr:tTiEUS. 

Linnaeus's father was a clergyman, of a family 
of peasants. The customs of Sweden were so 
primitive at that time that people under the rank 
of nobility had no surnames ; and, by a sort of 
prophetic inclination, the family of Lmnceus had 
designated themselves from a favorite linden or 
lime'tree^ which grew near their abode ; so that 
Carl von Linne meant Charles of the Lime-tree. 
The lime was not unworthy of being his godfa- 
ther. _ 

JOHN BUNGLE (THE HERO OF THE BOOK SO 
CALLED). 

Buncle is a most strange mixture of vehement 
Unitarianism in faith, liberality in ordinary judg- 
ment, and jovial selfishness in practice. He is a 
liberal, bigoted, whimsical, lawful sensualist. A 
series of good fortunes of a very peculiar descrip- 
tion (that is to say, the loss of seven wives in sue- 



POUSSIN. 171 

cession !) enables him to be a kind of innocent 
Henry VIII. He argues a lady into the sacred 
condition of marriage, spends a delightful season 
with her, she dies in the very nick of time, and 
he tries as hard as he can to grieve for a while, in 
order that he may justify himself all the sooner 
in taking another. This is the regular process for 
the whole seven ! With amazing animal spirits, 
iron strength, little imagination, and a relishing 
gusto, he is an amusing and lively narrator, with- 
out interesting our sympathy in the least, except 
in the relish with which he eats, drinks, and makes 
matrimony.* 

POUSSIK 

Poussin, like Corneille, was a Norman. The 
addition of the earnest and grave character of 
the Normans to the general French vivacicy ren- 
dered him one of the great names in art, fit to be 
mentioned with those of Italy. He had learning, 
luxuriousness, and sentiment, and gave himself up 
to each, as his subject inclined him, though never 
perhaps without a strong consciousness of the art 
as well as the nature of what he had to do. His 
historical performances are his driest ; his poetical 
subjects full of gusto ; his landscapes remote, 
meditative, and often with a fine darkness in 
them, as if his trees were older than any other 

* The reader can see, if he pleases, more about this extraor- 
dinary person in the " Book for a Corner." 



172 TABLE-TALK. 

painter's. Shade is upon them, as light is upon 
Claude's. 

Poussin was a genuine enthusiast, to whom his 
art was his wealth, whether it made him rich or 
not. He got as much money as he wanted, and 
would not hurry and degrade his genius to get 
more. 

A pleasant anecdote is related of him, at a 
time when he must have been in very moderate 
circumstances. He spent the greatest part of his 
life at Rome, and Bishop (afterward Cardinal) 
Mancini being attended by him one evening to 
the door, for want* of a servant, the Bishop said, 
" I pity you. Monsieur Poussin, for having no ser- 
vant." " And I pity your lordship," said the 
painter, " for having so many." 

The Bishop, by the way, must have been a 
very ill-bred or stupid man, to make such a re- 
mark. Fancy how beautifully Bishop Rundle, or 
Berkeley, or Thirlwall would 7iot have said it ! 
What respect they would have contrived to show 
to the non-possessor of the servant, without in the 
smallest degree alluding to the non-possession ! 

Was there no Roman Duke of Devonshire in 
those days, to teach men of quality how to be- 
have? 

PEIOR. 

Prior wrote one truly loving verse, if no other. 
It is in his " Solomon." The monarch is speaking 



BURKE AND PAINE. 173 

of a female slave, who had a real affection for 
him : 

" And ichen I called another^ Abra earned 

BUEKE AND PAINE. 

Paine had not the refinements which a nice 
education and a lively fancy had given to Burke. 
He could not discern, as his celebrated antagonist 
did, " the soul of goodness in things evil " — a no- 
ble faculty, when evil is to be made the best of. 
But the other's refinements, actuated by his van- 
ity, led him to uphold the evil itself, because he 
could talk finely about it, and because others had 
undertaken to put it down without his leave. 
Self -reference and personal importance are at the 
bottom of everything that men do, when they do 
not show themselves ready to make sacrifices to 
the public good. If the vanity still remains the 
same in many, even when they do, it may be par- 
doned them as an infirmity which does not inter- 
fere with their usefulness. Burke began with 
being a reformer, and remained one as long as he 
drew attention to himself by it, and could com- 
mand the respect of the "gentilities" among 
which he moved. When he saw, in contradiction 
to his prophecies, that the reform was to move in 
a wider sphere, and that he and his gentilities 
were not necessary to it, he was offended ; turned 
right round to the opposite side ; and wrote a 



174: TABLE-TALK. 

book which George III. said every gentleman 
ought to read. " There was a time," says Paine, 
" when it was impossible to make Mr. Burke be- 
lieve there would be any revolution in France. 
His opinion then was, that the French had neither 
spirit to undertake nor fortitude to support it ; 
and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by 
condemning it." 

The first French Revolution was defaced by 
those actions of popular violence which were the 
result of a madness caused by the madness of the 
aristocracy. The foolish system of hostility to 
France in which Englishmen suffered themselves 
to be brought up by those who thought themselves 
interested in preserving it, easily allowed them to 
confound the evil with the good, and consequent- 
ly to think ill of its advocates. Paine, therefore, 
was thought to write on a vulgar and pernicious 
side, while Burke had all the eclat of the gentili- 
ties. 

The most vulgar thing which Paine did was 
to deny the utility of a knowledge of the dead 
languages. He had none himself ; and he saw the 
knowledge often vaunted by men who, having 
nothing else to boast of, possessed of course (in 
the proper sense of the word) not even that. He 
paid these men the involuntary compliment of 
showing them that his ignorance of the matter 
and theirs were pretty much on a par ; and as 
they exalted what they did not understand, he 



RUSSIAN- HORN BAND. 175 

decried what he was ignorant of. It was a piece 
of inverted aristocracy in him — a privilege of non- 
possession. 

THE DUTCH AT THE CAPE. 

It is amusing to read of the ponderous indolence 
and cow-like ruminations of the Dutch settlers at 
the Cape of Good Hope. What an admirable 
word for them is " Settlers " ! 

Madame de Stael has given a ludicrous picture 
of the stiffness and formality of an English tea- 
table. Now, a Dutch tea-table is an English one 
cast in lead. 

RUSSIAIsr-HORN BAND. 

This, to be sure, is sounding the very " bass- 
note of humility." A man converted into a crotch- 
et ! An A flat in the sixtieth year of his age ! 
A fellow creature of Alfred and Epaminondas, 
who has passed his life in acting a semitone ! in 
waiting for his turn to exist, and then seizing the 
desperate instant, and being a puff ! * 

* " The Russian-horn music " (says an authority whose 
name I have forgotten) " was invented by Prince Gallitzin, in 
1762. This instrument consists of forty persons, whose life is 
spent in blowing one note. The sounds produced are precisely 
similar to those of an immense organ, with this difference, that 
each note seems to blend with its preceding and following one 
— a circumstance which causes a blunt sensation to the ear, 
and gives a monotony to the whole. However, the effect pos- 



176 TABLE-TALK. 

DOGS AND THEIR MASTERS. 

Mr. Jesse, in his " Anecdotes of Dogs," takes 
pains to prove that the dog is a better man than 
himself ; but, love dogs as we may, we must not 
blaspheme their master. Dogs have admirable 
qualities. They possess, in particular, a most 
affecting and superabundant measure of attach- 
ment, of lovingness for their human companion — 
singular as regards the differences of the two be- 
ings, and wonderfully and beautifully superior to 

sesses much sublimity when the performers are unseen ; but, 
when they are visible, it is impossible to silence reflections 
which jar with their harmony. To see human nature reduced 
to such a use calls up thoughts very inimical to our admiration 
of strains so awakened. I inquired who the instrument be- 
longed to (by that word both pipes and men are included), and 
was told it had just been purchased by a nobleman, on the re- 
cent death of its possessor. [They were serfs.] 

*' The band consists of twenty-five individuals, who play 
upon about fifty-five horns, all formed of brass of a conical 
shape, with the mouthpiece bent : the lowest of these horns is 
eight feet long and nine inches in diameter at the larger end, 
and sounds double A; the highest, which sounds E, is two 
inches and a half long, by one in diameter. Some of the 
horns, but not all, have keys for one or two semitones. When 
playing, the band is drawn up four deep, the trebles in front, 
and the very low horns laid on trestles at the back, so that the 
performer can raise the mouthpiece with ease, while the other 
end rests on the frame ; one man plays the three lowest horns, 
blowing them in turns as they are wanted. Not the least cu- 
rious portion of this machinery is the conductor, who, with the 
score before him on a desk, stands fronting his troops at what 



DOGS AND THEIR MASTERS. 177 

the common notions of self-interest : for, as Mr. 
Jesse's book shows, they are capable of quite as 
much attachment to the poorest as to the richest 
man, and, in the midst of the most hard-working 
and painful existence, will think themselves amply 
repaid by a crust and a caress. Delightful, ad- 
mirable, noble, is the loving, hard-working, un- 
bribable, martyr-spirited creature called the dog ; 
who will die rather than desert his master under 
the most trying circumstances ; who often does 
die, and (so to speak) breaks his heart for him, 
refusing to forsake his dead body or his grave. 

soldiers would call the left flank of the company, and con- 
tinues during the whole performance to beat the time audibly 
by tapping a little stick or cane on his desk. And this time 
he beats, not according to the equal divisions in a bar, but the 
number and quality of notes therein : thus, for a bar of three- 
fourth time, containing one crotchet followed by four quavers, 
he makes five taps, the last four twice as rapid as the first. 

" When the performance began, notwithstanding all we had 
read, although we knew that each demisemiquaver of a rapid 
octave must be breathed by a separate individual, we were 
astonished at the unity of efi'ect and correctness of time ; and 
this feeling continued undiminiished to the end. But to this 
our pleasure and approbation were confined, and, all moral 
considerations apart, we soon began to feel regret and pain 
that so much labor should have been bestowed on forming 
what may, probably, be a very first-rate band of Russian horns, 
but what is certainly a very second-rate band of wind-instru- 
ments. There is no expression, no coloring in the perform- 
ance ; and, though the tone produced by the bass horns is ex- 
tremely fine and powerful, and the tenors are soft and mellow, 
the trebles are shrill, and very frequently sadly out of tune.'* 
12 



178 TABLE-TALK. 

But still he must not be compared with the 
equally loving, more tried, and more awful crea- 
ture called Man, with his conflicting thoughts, his 
greater temptations, his " looking before and af- 
ter " ; his subjection, by reason of his very supe- 
riority, to the most distressing doubts, fears, dis- 
tracting interests, manifold ties, impressions of 
this world and the next — imaginations, consciences, 
responsibilities, tears. Between the noblest and 
most affectionate dog that dies out of a habit of 
love for his master, and the many-thoughted, 
many-hearted human being, who, loving existence 
and his family, can yet voluntarily face the gulf 
of futurity for some noble purpose, there is as 
much difference as between a thoughtless impulse 
and a motive burdened with the greatest draw- 
backs. 

Thus much for the idle sentences quoted from 
Monsieur Blaze, Lord Byron, and others, about 
the superiority of dogs to men ; things written in 
moments of spleen or ill will, contradicted by 
the writers in other passages, and thoughtlessly 
echoed, out of partiality to his subject, by kindly 
Mr. Jesse. 

BODY AND MIND. 

Pascal, in spite of his wisdom, was a victim to 
hypochondria and superstition. He was an ad- 
mirable mathematician, reasoner, wit, and a most 
excellent man ; and yet, notwithstanding this 



WANT OF IMAGINATION IN THE COMFORTABLE. 179 

union of the most solid and brilliant qualities, a 
wretched constitution sometimes reduced him to 
a state which idiots might have pitied. As if his 
body had not been ill-treated enough, he wore an 
iron girdle with points on it next his skin ; and 
he was in the habit of striking this girdle with 
his elbow, when a thought which he regarded as 
sinful or vain came across him. During his lat- 
ter days he imagined that he saw an abyss by the 
side of his chair, and that he was in danger of 
falling into it. How modest it becomes the ablest 
men to be, and thankful for a healthier state of 
blood, when they see one of the greatest of minds 
thus miserably treated by the case it lived in ! 

WANT OF IMAGINATION IN THE COMFOET- 
ABLE. 

People in general have too little imagination, 
and habit does not tend to improve it. The com- 
fort, therefore, w^hich they have derived ever since 
they were born from sustenance and warmth, they 
come to identify with the habitual feelings of 
everybody; and, though they read in the news- 
papers of the want of bread and fuel among the 
poor, it is with the utmost difficulty, and by a 
violent forcing of the reflection, that they can 
draw a distinction between the sensations of the 
poor man's flesh and stomach and those of their 
own. Hunger with themselves is brief ; they can 



180 TABLE-TALK. 

soon satisfy it. Cold is brief : they can go to the 
fire. They become unable to sympathize with the 
continuous operation of want. They think the 
poor man talks about cold and hunger, and that 
there must be some reason in it, inasmuch as he 
looks ill ; for they can picture to their imagina- 
tions a care-worn face, since they see so many 
about them, where the hands are warm and the 
stomachs well fed. But still, as their own hands 
are in the habit of being warm, and their stomachs 
comfortable, or at any rate uncomfortable with 
fullness, they have no abiding conception of hands 
cold for a whole day, or of an habitual craving 
for food. 

I do not mean to say that it would be desira- 
ble for people to be over-sensitive on these points; 
otherwise the distress of half a dozen of human be- 
ings would be sufficient to discomfort the whole 
globe. It is to be hoped that the martyrs to re- 
form and imagination will have suffered enough 
eventually to secure the infinite preponderance 
of good in this world. But, meanwhile, its ad- 
vance is the slower for it, and the apathy of the 
excessively comfortable sometimes not a little pro- 
voking. 

Take one of the clergymen, for instance, who 
have been writing addresses of late to the poor, 
to advise them to bear hunger and cold with pa- 
tience. One of these gentlemen sits down to his 
vmting-table, with his feet on a rug, before a 



WANT OF IMAGINATION IN THE COMFORTABLE. 181 

good fire, after an excellent breakfast, to recom- 
mend to others the endurance of evils, the least 
part of which would rouse him into a remonstrance 
with his cook or his coal-merchant, perhaps de- 
stroy his temper, and put him in a state of un- 
christian folly. " Bless me ! " cries he, looking 
about him, if there is the least bit of a " crick " 
in the window, " how intolerably cold it is this 
morning ! " and he rises from his chair, and not 
without indignation closes the intolerable window 
which the servant had so " shamefully neglected." 
His dinner is not ready when he returns from his 
ride. " 'Tis very shameful of the cook," quoth he; 
" I have eaten nothing to signify since breakfast, 
and am ready to sink." The dinner is brought in 
with all trepidation, and he does sink — that is to 
say, into an easy-chair; and fish, flesh, and fowl sink 
into him. Little does he think, and less does he 
endeavor to think (for the thought is not a com- 
fortable one), that the men to whom he wrote 
his address in the morning are in the habit of feel- 
ing this sinking sensation from morning till night, 
and of seeing their little crying children suffering 
from a distress which they Jcnoio to be so wretched. 
Many of these poor people sink into the grave ; 
and the comfortable clergyman thinks it much if 
he gets into his carriage, or puts his warm great- 
coat and handkerchief round his portly neck, and 
goes to smooth the poor man's passage to that 
better world which he himself will keep aloof 



182 TABLE-TALK. 

from as long as port and pheasant can help 
him. 

" What riches give us, let us then inquire : 
Meat, fire, and clothes. What more ? Meat, clothes, 
and fire." 

These are the three great necessaries of life, 
meaning by meat, food. After a few lines to 
show the insufficiency of superfluities for render- 
ing bad men happy, the poet says of these super- 
fluities : 

*' Perhaps you think the poor might have their part. 
Bond damns the poor, and hates them from his heart. 
The grave Sir Gilbert holds it for a rule, 
That every man in want is knave or fool. 

" ' God can not love (says Blunt, with tearless eyes) 
The wretch he starves ' — and piously denies. 
But the good Bishop, with a meeker air. 
Admits, and leaves them^ Providence's care." 

THE SmGING MAIS" KEPT BY THE BIRDS. 

Want of Imagination plays strange tricks with 
most people. I will tell you a fable. 

A traveler came into an unknown country 
where the people were more like birds than men, 
and twice as tall as the largest ostriches. They 
had beaks and wings, and lived in gigantic nests, 
upon trees of a proportionate size. The traveler, 
who was unfortunately a capital singer, happened 



THE SINGING MAN KEPT BY THE BIRDS. 183 

to be indulging in one of his favorite songs, when 
he was overheard by a party of this monstrous 
people, who caught him and carried him home. 
Here he led such a life as made him a thousand 
times wish for death. The bird family did not 
seem to be cruel to one another, or even inten- 
tionally so to him ; for they soon found out what 
he liked to eat, and gave him plenty of it. They 
also flattened him a corner of the nest for a bed ; 
and were very particular in keeping out of his 
way a pet tiger which threw him into the most 
dreadful agitations. But in all other respects, 
whether out of cruelty or fondness, or want of 
thought, they teased him to death. His habita- 
tion, at best, was totally unfit for him. His 
health depended upon exercise, particularly as 
he was a traveler ; but he could not take any in 
the nest, because it was hollow like a basin ; and, 
had he attempted to step out of it, he would have 
broken his neck. Sometimes they would handle 
him in their great claws, till his heart beat as if it 
would come through his ribs. Sometimes they 
kissed and fondled him with their horrid beaks. 
Sometimes they pulled his nose this way and that, 
till he gaped and cried out for anguish ; upon 
which they would grin from ear to ear, and stroke 
back his head, till the hairs came out by the 
roots. If he did not sing, they would pull his 
arms about, and cruelly spread out his fingers, as 
if to discover what was the matter with him ; and, 



184 TABLE-TALK. 

when he did sing to beguile his sorrows, he had 
the mortification of finding that they looked upon 
it as a mark of his contentment and happiness. 
They would sing themselves (for some of them 
were pretty good singing-birds for so coarse a 
species), to challenge him, as it were, to new ef- 
forts. At length our poor traveler fell sick of a 
mortal distemper, the termination of which was 
luckily hastened by the modes they took to cure 
it. " Wretch that I am ! " cried he, in his last 
moments, ^'I used to think it unmanly to care 
about keeping a goldfinch, or even a lark ; but all 
my manliness, in a like situation, can not prevent 
me from dying of torture." 

A STRANGE HEAYEK 

I have often thought (don't be frightened) 
that if any one set of men ought to go to heaven 
more than another, it's rascals ! Consider what 
fools the poor fellows are ; what frights they un- 
dergo ; what infamy they get ; what ends they 
often come to ; and, in most cases, what " births, 
parentages, and educations " they must have had. 
Or, if their anxieties have not been in proportion 
to their rascality, then consider what it is to want 
the feelings of other men ; what bad pleasures it 
betrays them into, and of what good ones it 
deprives them. Think of those miserable dogs 
among them who have never even succeeded as 
rascals. Fancy Dick Dreary in his old age, tooth- 



A STRANGE HEAVEN. 185 

less, despised, diseased, dejected, conscious that he 
has been all in the wrong, and unable to pay for a 
bit of fire in the winter to comfort his petty- 
larceny fingers. Is he to have nothing for all 
this ? Oh, depend upon it that, if he has not had 
it already, of some unaccountable sort or other 
(which brings matters round), your rascal must 
come right somehow. 

B, Theologians have various ways for settling 
that. 

A, Yes, but not for all ; and positively one 
single poor devil must not be omitted — no, not 
even though he be a Calvinist or an Inquisitor. 
Heavenly notions of justice are not to be at the 
mercy of the most infernal stupidity of mind. 
If I were a preacher, my doctrines would not go 
to flatter the poor dogs into crime with notions of 
certain kinds of absolution, which in that case it 
would be doubly infernal to refuse them. I should 
treat them as the fools which no men lite to be 
called ; but, at the same time, as the pitiable fools 
which such men undoubtedly are. 

Grave Gentleman. But a positive heaven for 
rascals ! 

A, {laughing). Oh, oh, verhicm sat, Dante 
has heavens for his rascals — heavens even for the 
Emperor Constantino and the slayer of the Albi- 
genses. Why mayn't we find a little blushing 
corner or so for Muggins, and Father Rack, and 
poor Dick Dreary ? 



186 TABLE-TALK. 

STANDma GODFATHER. 

To stand godfather is, I know, reckoned a very' 
trifling ceremony : people ask it of others, either 
to gratify their own vanity or that of the person 
asked ; they think nothing of the Heaven they 
are about to invoke. It is looked upon as a mere 
gossiping entertainment : a few child's squalls, a 
few mumbled amens, and a few mumbled cakes, 
and a few smirks accompanied by a few fees, and 
it is all over. The character and the peculiar faith 
of the promisers have nothing to do with it ; the 
child's interest has nothing to do with it : the 
person most benefited is the parson, who is think- 
ing all the time what sort of a present he shall 
get. Now, observe what I must do, should I un- 
dertake to be a godfather. I must come into the 
presence of God — a presence not to be slighted 
though in a private room — to worship Him with 
a falsehood in my mouth : that is, to make Him 
a profession of faith which I do not understand. 
I must then promise Him to teach the child this 
very faith which I do not understand, and to 
guard her youth from evil ways ; when it is very 
probable I shall never be with her or see her, and 
most likely, if I did see her, I should get my head 
broken by her relations for giving impertinent 
advice. Considered in itself, I think the idea of 
christening a child, and answering for what one 
can not possibly foresee, a very ridiculous one ; 



RELICS. 187 

but, when Heaven is called upon and the presence 
of the Deity invoked to witness it, it becomes a 
serious ceremony, though it may be an erroneous 
one ; and the invocation of the Deity is not to 
be sported with even on an erroneous occasion. 

MAGOTFYIITG TRIFLES. 

Affection, like melancholy, magnifies trifles : 
but the magnifying of the one is like looking 
through a telescope at heavenly objects ; that of 
the other, like enlarging monsters with a micro- 
scope. 

RELICS. 

It is amusing to think how the world neglect 
great men, and how they value their most paltry 
memorials ; and yet it shows the happy tendency 
of every trifle to keep up their reputation. Thus 
the warrior who is ungratefully used by his coun- 
try may obtain his reward after death by his cap 
or his sword ; a poet may be immortalized among 
the vulgar by the chair in which he used to write ; 
and the beautiful Mary Stuart triumph over her 
rival Elizabeth by the mere force of a miniature. 
Sometimes, indeed, this deification of kickshaws 
may be abused. The Roman Catholics have five 
or six legs, original legs, of the same saint, in five 
or six different places, so that either five of the 
claimants tell us a story, or the saint must have 
been a monster. They are also a little too apt to 



138 TABLE-TALK. 

suppose every tombstone they dig up in Italy to 
have been a saint's or a martyr's ; and they deify 
the names they find upon them, which for aught 
we know may have belonged to overseers of the 
road, or some of the greatest scoundrels in an- 
cient Rome, or perhaps even to the persecutors of 
the primitive Christians. 

SOLITUDE. 

Hermits might have been very comfortable for 
aught I know, but I am persuaded there is no such 
thing, after all, as a perfect enjoyment of soli- 
tude ; for, the more delicious the solitude, the 
more one wants a companion. 

LOUIS XIV. AND GEORGE IV. 

Louis XIV. was like George IV., inasmuch as 
he was fond of pleasure ; but his ambition ren- 
dered him at once a better and a worse man than 
the latter, for it made him fonder of literature 
and the arts, which he knevv^ would immortalize 
him, and it plunged him into a hundred useless 
wars, which the latter has never been able to 
undertake, and probably never would have under- 
taken, as he is so grossly indolent ; for I do not 
think his virtues would preserve him from any 
error. In short, if the vices of Louis had greater 
opportunity to extend themselves than those of 
George, the Frenchman was, nevertheless, more 



HENRY lY. OF FRANCE AND ALFRED. 189 

sensible, more tasteful, more refined in his plea- 
sures, more like a prince. He was more like the 
Emperor Augustus, except that he became a reli- 
gious bigot in his old age — the common end of 
many a vicious man who is disappointed. 

HENRY lY. OF FRANCE AND ALFRED. 

My two favorite princes are Henry IV. of 
France and our own Alfred. The one, though 
he was a man of gallantry (which is to be par- 
doned, in a great measure, in a Frenchman of his 
time), was never depraved, never lost the good- 
ness of his heart ; and he was a perfect hero of 
chivalry, as well as a philosopher in adversity. 
The other is the most perfect character in the list 
of monarchs of any age or country, a man who 
has come down to posterity without a single vice ; 
a warrior, a legislator, a poet, a musician, a phi- 
losopher ; a mixture of everything great and 
small that renders us dignified, wise, or accom- 
plished ; a combination, indeed — - 

" Where evVj god did seem to set his seal 
To give the world assurance of a man.'" 

You se^ I must have recourse to Shakespeare. 
Nobody but such a writer can describe such a 
king. 

FELLOWS OF COLLEGES. 

These Fellows are absolute monks, without 
monkish superstition or restraint ; they live luxu- 



190 TABLE-TALK. 

riously, walk, ride, read, and have nothing to get, 
in this world, but a good appetite of a morning. 

BEAUTY A JOY I¥ HEAVEN. 

Beauty of every kind, poeticized, comes into 
the composition of my heaven — ^beauty of think- 
ing, beauty of feeling, beauty of talking, beauty 
of hearing, and, of course, beauty of seeing, in- 
cluding visions of beautiful eyes and beautiful 
turns of limb. 

ASSOCIATIONS OF GLASTONBUEY. 

Glastonbury is a town famous in old records 
for the most ancient abbey in the kingdom, for 
being the supposed birthplace of King Arthur, 
and for producing a species of whitethorn which 
was said to bud miraculously on Christmas-day ; 
St. Joseph of Arimathea, it seems, having stuck 
his walking-stick in the ground on his arrival 
here, upon which the earth expressed its sense 
of the compliment by turning it into a thorn in 
blossom. Glastonbury is said to be the burial- 
place of King Arthur ; but I am afraid the truth 
is, that he was buried in the same place in which 
he was born and lived — the brain of a poet. 

LIBERTY OF SPEECH. 

Whenever we feel ourselves in the possession 
of such a liberty and confidence of sociality as 



WRITING POETRY. 191 

are not to be found in France or Turkey, then I 
must beg leave to return my thanks to the Hamp- 
dens, the Holts, Andrew Marvells, and other old 
English freemen, whose exertions, acting upon 
us to this very day, enable us to say and to enjoy 
what we do. 

WKITING POETRY. 

Poetry is very trying work, if your heart and 
spirits are in it — particularly with a weak body. 
The concentration of your faculties, and the ne- 
cessity and ambition you feel to extract all the 
essential heat of your thoughts, seem to make up 
that powerful and exhausting effect called inspi- 
ration. The ability to sustain this, as well as all 
other exercises of the spirit, will evidently de- 
pend, in some measure, upon the state of your 
frame ; so that Dryden does not appear to have 
been altogether so fantastical in dieting himself 
for a task of verse ; nor Milton and others, in 
thinking their faculties stronger at particular 
periods : though the former, perhaps, might have 
rendered his caution unnecessary by undeviating 
temperance ; and the latter have referred to the 
sunshine of summer, or the in-door snugness of 
frosty weather, what they chose to attribute to a 
loftier influence. 

THE WOMEIST OF ITALY. 
The general aspect of the women in Italy is 
striking, but not handsome ; that is to say, stronger 



192 TABLE-TALK. 

marked and more decided than pleasing. But, 
when you do see fine faces, they are fine indeed ; 
and they have all an intelligence and absence of 
affectation, very different from that idea of for- 
eigners which the French are apt to give people. 

FRENCH PEOPLE. 

The French are pleasant in their manner, but 
seem to contain a good deal of ready-made heat 
and touchiness, in case the little commerce of 
flattery and sweetness is not properly carried on. 
There are a great many pretty girls, but I see no 
fine-faced old people, which is not a good symp- 
tom. Nor do the looks of the former contain 
much depth, or sentiment, or firmness of purpose. 
They seem made like their toys, not to last, but 
to play with and break up. 

THE BLIND. 

It is very piteous to look at blind people ; but 
it is observed that they are generally cheerful be- 
cause others pay them so much attention ; and 
one would suffer a good deal to be continually 
treated with love. 

LONDON. 

London, as you say, is not a poetical place to 
look at ; but surely it is poetical in the very 
amount and comprehensiveness of its enormous 



SOUTHEY'S POETRY. 193 

experience of pain and pleasure — a Shakespearean 
one. It is one of the great giant representatives 
of mankind, with a huge beating heart ; and 
much of the vice even, and misery of it (in a 
deep philosophical consideration), is but one of 
the forms of the movement of a yet unsteadied 
progression, trying to balance things, and not 
without its reliefs ; though, God knows, there is 
enough suffering to make us all keep a lookout 
in advance. 

SOUTHEY'S POETRY. 

I believe you are right about Southey's poetry, 
and cry mercy to it accordingly. He went to it 
too mechanically, and with too much nonchalance ; 
and the consequence was a vast many words to 
little matter. Nor had he the least music in him 
at all. The consequence of which was, that he 
wrote .prose out into lyrical wild shapes, and took 
the appearance of it for verse. Yet there was 
otherwise a poetical nature distributed through 
the mass, idly despising the concentration that 
would have been the salvation of it. 



VULGAR CALUMNY. 

I believe that one part of the public will al- 
ways, if they can, calumniate any man who tries 
to amend them, and whom therefore they con- 
clude to be their superior ; but the great part, 
13 



194 TABLE-TALK. 

perhaps these included, will nevertheless be al- 
ways willing to read one, provided they are amused 
by one's writings. 

VALUE OF ACQUIREMENTS. 

Acquirements of every sort increase our powers 
of doing good, both to ourselves and others ; and 
the knowledge of languages — of any language 
almost — may turn out of the greatest service to 
us in advancing our prospects in life. The knowl- 
edge of French — and I have no doubt the case is 
the same with that of Italian, of Spanish, of Ger- 
man, etc. — has been known to give a young man 
great and sudden advantages over his fellows, and 
send him abroad upon the most interesting and 
important commissions. Suppose a messenger 
were required, for instance, to go on the sudden 
upon some urgent matter of government business 
to another country, and none were immediately 
to be had. A clerk starts up who understands 
Italian, and is dispatched in a hurry to Rome or 
Turin. Suppose an assistant botanist is required 
to explore an Eastern country ; what an advan- 
tage the knowledge of Arabic or Persian would 
give him over competitors ignorant of those lan- 
guages ! Somebody has said that a man who un- 
derstood four languages besides his own was five 
men instead of one. 



ATTRACTIONS OF HAM. 195 

THE BEAKD. 

Physicians proclaim it to be a '• natural respi- 
rator " ; it is manifestly a clothing and a comfort 
to the jaws and throat — ergo, probably, to regions 
adjoining ; it is manly ; it is noble ; it is hand- 
some. Think of all those beards of old, under 
tents and turbans ; think of them now — how the 
whole East is bearded still, as it ev-er was, and 
ever will be, beard without end. The Chinese, it 
is true, are unbearded ; but that was a Tartar do- 
ing, the work of the dynasty that is now being 
ousted. Confucius came before it, and had a 
beard as profound as his philosophy, you may 
rest assured. How else would the philosophy 
have come ? — how have brooded to such purpose ? 
— been so warm in his " nares " (as you justly ob- 
serve) or so flowing toward his fellow creatures ? 

ATTRAOTIOlSrS OF HAM. 

Old trees, the placidest of rivers, Thomson up 
above you. Pope near you, Cowley himself not a 
great way oif : I hope here is a nest of repose, 
both material and spiritual, of the most Cowleian 
and Evelynian sort. Ham, too, you know, is ex- 
pressly celebrated both by Thomson and Arm- 
strong ; and though that infernal Duke of Lau- 
derdale lived there, who put people to the rack 
(in the Jir St old original Ham House, I believe — 



196 ' TABLE-TALK. 

he married a Dysart), yet even the bittiier taste of 
him is taken out of the mouth by the sweets of 
these poets, and by the memories of the good 
Duke and Duchess of Queensberry (Prior's Kitty), 
who nursed their friend Gay there when he was 
ill. Ay, and when he was well ; and upon ham 
as well as in it ; for you know he was a great 
eater, which made him, of course, ill again ; and 
then they fed him on teas, and syllabubs, and 
ladies'-fingers, and again made him well, and able 
to be ill another time. And he was a punster too, 
was Gay, and doubtless punned as well as feasted 
on ham. 

SLEEPII^G UISTDER THE SKY. 

The other day I had a delicious sleep in a hay- 
cock. These green fields and blue skies throw 
me into a kind of placid intoxication. Are there 
many moments more delicious than the one in 
which you feel yourself going to slumber, with 
the sense of green about you, of an air in your face, 
and of the great sky arching over your head ? 
One feels, at such times, all the grandeur of plane- 
tary consciousness without the pain of it. You 
know what I mean. There is a sort of kind and 
beautiful sensuality in it which softens the cuts 
and oppressiveness of intellectual perception. 
Certainly, a country so green as England can 
not well be equaled by any other at such a 
season. 



WAR POETRY. 197 

WAK POETRY. 

You may judge what I felt about the war 
sonnets, when I opened the book on the one be- 
ginning — 

" Blaze gun to gun," etc., etc., 

with that affectation of encouraging " living 
mires," and " hells of fire," which is or ought to 
be revolting to a poet's heart, and is not at all his 
business : for to say it is necessary to oppose the 
" commonplaces of humanity " with such outrages 
upon them, is itself a commonplace, however it 
may seem otherwise to the unreflecting. Man- 
kind are always too ready to continue the barbar- 
ism, war ; and whatever may be the unavoidable- 
ness of it, or even the desirableness of it, at some 
particular moment, when forced upon us by bar- 
barism itself, it is not the poet's business to 
lay down his harp of Orpheus and halloo brutali- 
ties on. 

And as to God's permission, and therefore use 
of such things, we might as well encourage, in- 
stead of piously helping to do away, any other 
evils through which, or in spite of which, good 
mysteriously progresses, and strike up howls in 
praise of murder in ordinary and Bartholomew 
massacres. Such mistakes vex one in men of 
genius, who ought to know better. 



198 TABLE TALK. 

MO:tTEY-GETTlNG. 

You are right about money-getting in the main, 
horrible as are the abuses of it, and provoking 
sometimes its predominance. Besides, it is a 
phase of things through which all the world must 
go, till they have all made acquaintance with one 
another, and all interchanged their goods and 
knowledges ; by which time it is to be hoped 
they will all have discovered the means and ad- 
vantages of obtaining more leisure, varying the 
pursuit, and exalting its objects : for I suppose 
we are not to believe that the world is to go on 
through countless millions of ages precisely as it 
does at this or any other moment, merely because 
Jones trades with Thompson, and Smith is a pork- 
butcher. 

VALUE OF WOKDS. 

Words are often things also, and very precious, 
especially on the gravest occasions. Without 
" words," and the truth of things that is in them, 
what were we ? 

UNWRITTEIT REVELATIONS. 

The only two books of paramount authority 
with me are the Book of Nature, and the heart of 
its reader, Man ; and that the operations in the 
one, and the aspirations of the other (though I 
fully concede, as I am bound to do, all the recon- 



WEEPING. 199 

cilements, and possibilities, and transcendentations 
of every kind, which greater understandings and 
imaginations than my own may see in other 
books), compel me — if so glad a conclusion can be 
called compulsion — to be of the opinion that God 
is the unmingled, wholly benevolent, and conscious 
spirit of Good, working through His agent, Man ; 
that evil, where it is evil, and not a necessary por- 
tion of good (as it probably all is ultimately), is 
the difficulty presented to the course of this work- 
ing by the unconscious, involuntary, and there- 
fore unmalignant mystery called Matter ; that God, 
though not immediately or in all stages of His 
processes almighty, is ultimately so ; and that His 
constant occupation is the working out of heavens 
in place and time, in which prospection and re- 
trospection somehow or other become reconciled 
to the final conscious beatitude of all the souls 
that have ever existed. /^[(^JiU 

WEEPma. 

It is an affecting, and would be a startling con- 
sideration, to think that God has given us tears 
for such express purposes of relief, as knowing 
how much our sorrows would need them, were not 
this very fact, among others, a proof (at least, it 
is a great evidence to myself) that all other needs 
of our affections are destined to be made up to us 
in good time. For tears, though they calm the 



200 TABLE-TALK. 

first outbreaks of affliction, do not suffice for its 
subsequent yearnings ; and as those yearnings 
continue — often with great returns of anguish to 
the last — sufficingness, I think, remains in store 
for them also. I should be one of the unhappiest, 
instead of the most resigned of men, at this mo- 
ment, if I did not constantly, and as it were in- 
stinctively, feel that I should rejoin all the dear 
ones whom I have lost — ^words that now, as I 
write, wring bitter and unsufficing tears from the 
quivering of the soul within me. Encourage and, 
as it were, throw yourself heartily into the arms 
of this expectation ; think how worthy it is, both 
of man and God, quite apart from the dogmas 
which too often render both so much the reverse ; 
and, meantime, act in every respect with regard to 
your dear one just as you feel sure she vjould loish 
you to actj weeping as plentifully as you need, 
but as patiently too, and considering her as only 
gone before you, to be rejoined : she, all the 
while, being delivered from all Aer pain, spiritual 
as well as bodily, because she now possesses that 
certainty, as a disembodied spirit, which, for 
some finally good purpose, it is not fit that we, 
who are yet on earth, should possess ourselves. 
For my part, I confess to you that I often feel it 
highly probable that the spirits of my own be- 
loved dead are in the room with me, and that they 
feel a special and heavenly pleasure by seeing that 
I do so, and by knowing the comfort it gives me. 



WEEPING. 201 

I count this no kind of madness, but one of the 
heights of reason ; for it does not unfit me for the 
common work of life, but, on the contrary, helps 
it. And as it neither fevers me, nor is caused by 
any fever itself, I count it not among the un- 
healthy, but the healthy capabilities of my nature ; 
therefore of anybody else's nqiture who chooses 
reasonably to enjoy it. Uu/E- ' 



IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 



OF 



POPE AND SWIFT. 



CONYERSATION" OF POPE. 

EEPORTED BY A YOUNa GENTLEMAN WHO DINED WITH HIM. 

July 4, 1727. 
Yesterday was a day of delight. I dined with 
Mr. Pope. The only persons present were the 
venerable lady his mother, Mrs. Martha Blount, 
and Mr. Walscott, a great Tory, but as great a 
lover of Dryden ; which Mr. Pope was pleased to 
inform me was the reason he had invited me to 
meet him. Mr. Pope was in black, with a tie- 
wig. I could not help regarding him, as he sat 
leaning in his arm-chair before dinner, in the light 
of a portrait for posterity. When he came into 
the room, after kindly making me welcome, he 
took some flowers out of a little basket that he 
had brought with him, and presented them, not to 
Mrs. Martha, who seemed to look as if she ex- 



204 TABLE-TALK. 

pected it, but to Mrs. Pope ; which I thought 
very pretty, and Hke a gentleman, not in the or- 
dinary way. But the other had no reason to be 
displeased ; for, turning to her with the remain- 
der, he said : " I was thinking of a compliment to 
pay you ; so I have done it." He flatters with 
as much delicacy as Sir Richard Steele ; and the 
ladies like it as much from him. What fine- 
shaped fellows have I seen, who could not call up 
half such looks into their eyes ! 

I was in a flutter of spirits, which took away 
my appetite. Mr. Pope recommended his fish 
and his Banstead mutton to no purpose. I was 
too well fed with hearing him talk. However, I 
mechanically drank his wine, which emboldened 
me to say something. What I said, I do not very 
well remember, and it is no matter. I have even 
forgotten some agreeable stories related by Mr. 
Walscott about the civil wars ; but every word 
that passed the lips of Mr. Pope seems engraven 
on my brain. From the subject of killing mut- 
ton, the talk fell upon cruelty to animals, upon 
which Mr. Pope made some excellent observa- 
tions. He began by remarking how strange it 
was that little or nothing had been said of it in 
books. 

Mr. Walscott. I suppose authors have been 
too much in the habit of attending to the opera- 
tion of their own minds. 

Mfv. Pope. But they have been anglers, I 



COF^ERSATION OF POPE. 205 

have a curious book in my library written by one 
Isaac Walton, an old linen-draper in the time of 
Charles the Second, who was fond of meadows 
and village ale-houses, and has really a pretty pas- 
toral taste. This man piques himself on his hu- 
manity ; and yet the directions he gives on the 
subject of angling (for the book is written on that 
art) are full of such shocking cruelty that I do not 
care to repeat them before ladies. He wrote the 
lives of Donne, Hooker, and others, all anglers, and 
good religious men. Yet I suppose they were all 
as cruel. It is wonderful how the old man passes 
from pious reflections to the tortures of fish and 
worms, just as if pain were nothing. Yet what 
else are the devil and his doings made of ? 

Me. Walscott. Dryden was an angler. 

Mr. Pope. Yes; he once exclaimed of D'Urfey, 
" He fish ! " because the man attempted to write. 
There is a passage in his " Astrsea Redux," writ- 
ten in the proper fishing spirit ; that is to say, in 
which all the consideration is for the fisher, and 
none for the fish. 

Mr. Walscott. I remember it. He is speak- 
ing of General Monk, and the way in which he 
brought about the grand stroke for the Restora- 
tion : 

" 'Twas not the hasty product of a day, 
But the well-ripened fruit of wise delay. 
He, like a patient angler, ere he strook, 
Would let him play a while upon the hook." 



206 TABLE-TALK. 

Me. Pope. The " patient angler " ! Mighty- 
patient truly, to sit at a man's ease and amuse 
himself ! The question is, what the fish think 
of it. 

Mrs. Martha Blount. Sure it must be so ; 
and yet I never once thought of that before. God 
forgive me for the murders I committed last year 
in Oxfordshire, at the instigation of my brother ! 

Mr. Pope looked at her with benevolence as 
she said this ; but he was too much in earnest to 
pay her the compliments which ordinary gallantry 
would have struck out of the confession. I really 
believe he feels as much for carp and trout as 
most men do for each other. 

Mr. Walscott. But would it not be exchang- 
ing one pain for another, to make people think 
too much of these things ? 

Mr. Pope. That is well said. But I know not 
what right we have to continue putting our fellow 
creatures to pain, for the sake of avoiding it our- 
selves. Besides, there is a pain that exalts the 
understanding and morals, and is not unallied 
with pleasure ; which can not be said of putting 
hooks into poor creatures' jaws and bowels. 

Mr. Walscott. There is a good deal in that. 
Yet all animals prey upon one another. We prey 
upon them ourselves. We are at this minute 
availing ourselves of the cruelties of butchers and 
fishermen. 

Mr. Pope. Not the cruelties. Killing and tor- 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 207 

turing are different. Death is inevitable to all ; 
and a sheep who has passed his days in the 
meadows, and undergone a short death from a 
knife, has had as good a bargain as most of us. 
Animals kill, but they do not torture one an- 
other. 

Mr. Walscott. I think I have read of in- 
stances. Yes, I am sure of it ; and what think 
you of the cat with a mouse ? 

Mr. Pope. Why, I think she is very like an 
angler. I should wish to see a treatise on the 
subject by a cat. It is a meditative creature, 
like old Isaac, and is fond of fish. I am glad 
to see how much the fera natura excuses them 
both ; but to us, who can push our meditations 
further, the excuse is not the same. 

Mr. Walscott. Yet this appears to be in- 
stinct. What say you to Nature ? It is her own 
doing. 

Mr. Pope. Nature is a very wide term. We 
make use of it rather to get rid of arguments 
than to enforce them. If it is the cat's nature to 
torment, it is man's nature to know better. Im- 
provement is nature. The reflections we are now 
making are nature. I was wrong in saying that 
no animal tortures another ; but pray observe — 
we abuse animals, when it suits us, as the brute 
creation, and call upon them to bear testimony to 
our natural conduct, when we are pleased to re- 
semble them. Now, the matter is, that we ought 



208 TABLE-TALK. 

to imitate them solely in what is good and bene- 
ficial ; and in all other cases, give both them and 
ourselves the benefit of our better knowledge. 

Mr. Walscott. Evil will exist in spite of us. 

Mr. Pope. I do not know that. It is impos- 
sible for us, who only see to the length of a 
little miserable point in the midst of eternity, to 
say what will or will not exist. But we must 
give our fellow creatures the benefit of our knowl- 
edge, and our ignorance, too. If we can not 
abolish evil, we may diminish it, or divide it 
better ; and nature incites us to do so by putting 
the thought in our heads. It is fancied by some, 
and I dare say anglers fancy it, that animals, dif- 
ferent from us in their organization, do not feel 
as we do. I hope not. It is at least a good argu- 
ment for consolation, when we can do nothing to 
help them ; but, as we are not sure of it, it is an 
argument not to be acted upon when we can. 
They must have the benefit of our want of cer- 
tainty. Come, anglers shall have the benefit of 
it, too. Old Walton was as good a man as you 
could make out of an otter ; and I like the otter 
the better for him. Dryden, I am sure, was hu- 
mane : he was too great a man to be otherwise. 
But he had all his bodily faculties in perfection ; 
and I sometimes think that animal spirits take the 
place of reflection on certain animal occasions, 
and fairly occupy the whole man instead of it, 
even while he thinks he's thinking. Yet I am 



CONVERSATIOX OF POPE. 209 

afraid Donne and the others sophisticated ; for 
subtlety was their business. There are certain 
doctrines that do men no good, when the impor- 
tance of a greater or less degree of pain in this 
world comes to be made a question of ; and so 
they get their excuse that way. Anything rather 
than malignity and the determination to give pain; 
and yet I know not how the angler is to be found 
guiltless on that score, if he reflects on what 
he is going about. I am sure he must hurt his 
own mind, and perplex his ideas of right and 
wrong. 

Mr. Walscott concluded the argument by own- 
ing himself much struck with the variety of re- 
flections which Mr. Pope had brought forward or 
suggested. He said he thought they would make 
a good poem. Mr. Pope thought so too, if en- 
livened with wit and description ; and said he 
should, perhaps, turn it in his mind. He remarked 
that, till the mention of it by Sir Richard Steele, 
in the '* Tatler," he really was not aware that any- 
thing had been said against cruelty to animals by 
an English writer, with the exception of the fine 
hint in Shakespeare about the beetle. '' Steele," 
said he, " was then a gay fellow about town, and 
a soldier ; yet he did not think it an imputation 
on his manhood to say a good word for tomtits 
and robins. Shakespeare, they tell us, had been 
a rural sportsman ; and yet he grew to sympathize 
with an insect." I mentioned the " Rural Sports " 
14 



210 TABLE-TALK. 

of Mr. Gay, as enlisting that poet among the 
anglers that rejected worms. "Yes," said he, 
" Gay is the prettiest fera natura that ever was, 
and catches his trout handsomely to dine upon. 
But you see the effect of habit, even upon him. 
He must lacerate fish, and yet would not hurt 
a fly. Dr. Swift, who loves him as much as he 
hates angling, said to him one day at my Lord 
Bolingbroke's, ' Mr. Gay, you are the only angler 
I ever heard of, with an idea in his head ; and it 
is the only idea you have, not worth having.' 
Angling makes the Dean melancholy, and sets 
him upon his yahoos." 

This authority seemed to make a greater im- 
pression upon Mr. Walscott than all the reasoning. 
He is a very great Tory, and prodigiously ad- 
mires the Dean. Mr. Pope delighted him by ask- 
ing him to come and dine with them both next 
week ; for the Dean is in England, and Mr. Pope's 
visitor. I am to be there too. " But," says he, 
" you must not talk too much about Dry den ; for 
the Doctor does not love him." Mr. Walscott 
said he was aware of that circumstance from the 
Dean's works, and thought it the only blemish in 
his character. For my part, I had heard a story 
of Dryden telling him he would never be a poet ; 
but I said nothing. Mr. Pope attributed his dis- 
like to a general indignation he felt against his 
relations, for their neglect of him when young. 
For Dryden was his kinsman. The Davenants 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 211 

are his relations, and he does not like them. Mr. 
Walscott asked if he was an Englishman or an 
Irishman ; for he never could find out. " You 
would find out," answered Pope, "if you heard 
him talk ; for he can not get rid of the habit of 
saying a for e. He would be an Englishman with 
all his heart if he could ; but he is an Irishman, 
that is certain, and with all his heart too, in one 
sense ; for he is the truest patriot that country 
ever saw. He has the merit of doing Ireland the 
most wonderful services, without loving her ; and 
so he does to human nature, which he loves as 
little ; or at least he thinks so. This, and his wit, 
is the reason why his friends are so fond of him. 
You must not talk to him about Irish rhymes," 
added Mr. Pope, " any more than you must talk 
to me about the gods and abodes in my Homer, 
which he quarrels with me for. The truth is, we 
all write Irish rhymes ; and the Dean contrives 
to be more exact in that way than most of us." 
" What ! " said Mr. Walscott, " does he carry his 
Irish accent into his writings, and yet think to 
conceal himself ? " Mr. Pope read to us an odd 
kind of Latin-English effusion of the Dean's, which 
made us shake with laughter. It was about a con- 
sultation of physicians. The words, though Latin 
themselves, make English when put togetEer ; and 
the Hibernianism of the spelling is very plain. I 
remember a taste of it. A doctor begins by in- 
quiring : 



212 TABLE-TALK. 

'' Is his Honor sic ? Prse laetus f elis pulse. It 
do es beat veris loto deP^ 

Here de spells day. An Englishman would 
have used the word da, 

" No," says the second doctor, " no notis as qui 
cassi e ver fel tu metri it," f etc., etc. 

Metri for 77iay try. 

Mr. Pope told us that there were two bad 
rhymes in the " Rape of the Lock," and in the 
space of eight lines — side and subside, and endued 
and subdued.\ 

Mr. Walscott. Those would be very good 
French rhymes. 

Mr. Pope. Yes, the French make a merit of 
necessity, and force their poverty upon us for 
riches. But it is bad in English. However, it is 
too late to alter what I wrote. I now care less 
about them, notwithstanding the Doctor. When 
I was a young man, I was for the free disengaged 
way of Dryden, as in the " Essay on Criticism " ; 
but the town preferred the style of my " Pastorals," 
and somehow or other I agreed with them. I then 
became very cautious, and wondered how those 
rhymes in the " Lock " escaped me. But I have 
now come to this conclusion : that when a man 
has established his reputation for being able to do 

*" Is his Honor sick ? Pray let us feel his pulse. It does 
beat very slow to-day, 

f No, no, no ! 'tis as quick as I ever felt. You may try it. 
\ Vide pp. 120, 121 of the present volume. 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 213 

a thing, he may take liberties. Weakness is one 
thing, and the carelessness of power another. This 
makes all the difference between those shambling 
ballads that are sold among the common people 
and the imitations of them by the wits to serve a 
purpose ; between Sternhold and Hopkins, and the 
ballads on the Mohocks and great men. 

Mr. Pope then repeated, with great pleasantry, 
Mr. Gay's verses in the '' Wonderful Prophecy " : 

^Trom Mohock and from Hawkubite, 
Good Lord, deliver me ! 
Who wander through the streets by night 
Committing cruelty." * 

Mr. Walscott, with all his admiration of Dry- 
den, is, I can see, a still greater admirer of the 
style of Mr. Pope. But his politics hardly make 
him know which to prefer. I ventured to say 
that the " Rape of the Lock " appeared to me per- 

* The other verses, which Mr. Pope's visitor has not set 
down, are as follows : 

" They slash our sons with bloody knives, 

And on our daughters fall ; 
And if they ravish not our wives, 

We have good luck withal. 
Coaches and chairs they overturn, 

Nay, carts most easily ; 
Therefore from Gog and eke Magog, 

Good Lord, deliver me ! " 

The Mohocks were young rakes, of whom terrible stories 
were told. They were said to be all of the Whig party. 



214 TABLE-TALK. 

f ection ; but that still, in some kinds of poetry, 
I thought the licenses taken by the "Essay on 
Criticism " very happy in their effect : as, for in- 
stance, said I, those long words at the end of 
couplets : 

" Thus, when we view some well-proportioned dome 
(The world's just wonder, and e'en thine, O Eome!) 
"No single parts unequally surprise ; 
All come united to the admiring eyes ; 
No monstrous height, or breadth, or length appear ; 
The whole at once is bold and regular." 

Now here, I said, is the regularity and the 
boldness too. And again : 

*' Twere well might critics still this freedom take; 
But Appius reddens at each word you speak, 
And stares tremendous with a threatening eye. 
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry." 

And that other couplet : 

" With him most authors steal their works, or buy; 
Garth did not write his own Dispensary,'''^ 

I said, this last line, beginning with that strong 
monosyllable, and throwing off in a sprightly 
manner the long word at the end, was like a fine 
bar of music, played by some master of the vio- 
lin. Mr. Pope smiled, and complimented me on 
the delicacy of my ear, asking me if I understood 
music. I said no, but was very fond of it. He 
fell into a little musing, and then observed that 
he did not know how it was, but writers fond of 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 215 

music appeared to have a greater indulgence for 
the licenses of versification than any others. The 
two smoothest living poets were not much attached 
to that art. (I guess he meant himself and Dr. 
Swift.) He inquired if I loved painting. I told 
him so much so that I dabbled in it a little my- 
self, and liked nothing so much in the world, after 
poetry. "Why, then," said he, "you and I, some 
fine morning, will dabble in it like ducks." I was 
delighted at the prospect of this honor, but said I 
hoped his painting was nothing nigh equal to his 
poetry, or I would not venture to touch his pal- 
ette. "Oh," cried he, "I will give you confi- 
dence." He rose with the greatest good nature, 
and brought us a sketch of a head after Jervis, 
and another of Mrs. Martha. I had begun to fear 
that they might be unv/orthy of so great a man, 
even as amusements ; but they were really won- 
derfully well done. I do think he would have 
made a fine artist, had he not been a poet.* He 
observed that we wanted good criticism on pic- 
tures ; and that the best we had yet were some 
remarks of Steele's in the "Spectator," on the 
cartoons of Raphael. He added a curious obser- 
vation on Milton : that with all his regard for the 
poets of Italy, and his travels in that country, he 
has said not a word of their painters, nor scarcely 
alluded to painting throughout his works. 

* This has been doubted by others who have seen his per-: 
formances. Some of them remain, and are not esteemed. 



216 TABLE-TALK. 

Mr. Walscott. Perhaps there was something 
of the Puritan in that. Courts, in Milton's time, 
had a taste for pictures : King Charles had a fine 
taste. 

Me. Pope. True ; but Milton never gave up 
his love of music — his playing on the organ. If 
he had loved painting, he would not have held Ms 
tongue about it. I have heard somebody remark 
that the names of his two great archangels are 
those of the two great Italian painters, and that 
their characters correspond ; which is true and 
odd enough. But he had no design in it. He 
would not have confined his praises of Raphael 
and Michael Angelo to that obscure intimation. 
I believe he had no eyes for pictures. 

Me. Walscott. Dryden has said fine things 
about pictures. There is the epistle to your friend 
Sir Godfrey, and the ode on young Mrs. Killigrew. 
Did he know anything of the art ? 

Me. Pope. Why, I believe not ; but he dashed 
at it in his high way, as he did at politics and 
divinity, and came off with flying colors. Dry- 
den's poetic faith was a good deal like his reli- 
gious. He could turn it to one point after another, 
and be just enough in earnest to make his belief 
be taken for knowledge. 

Mr. Pope told us that he had been taken, when 
a boy, to see Dryden at a coffee-house. I felt my 
color change at this anecdote, so vain do I find 
myself. I took the liberty of asking him how 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 217 

he felt at the sight ; for it seems he only saw Dry- 
den ; he did not speak to him, which is a pity. 

Mr. Pope. Why, I said to myself : " That is 
the great Mr. Dryden ; there he is : he must be a 
happy "inayiP This notion of his happiness was 
the uppermost thing in my mind, beyond even his 
fame. I thought a good deal of that ; but I knew 
no pleasure, even at that early age, like writing 
verses ; and there, said I, is the man who can 
write verses from morning till night, and the 
finest verses in the world. I am pretty much of 
the same way of thinking now. Yes ; I really do 
think that I could do nothing but write verses all 
day long, just taking my dinner, and a walk or 
so, if I had health. And I suspect it is the same 
with all poets — I mean with all who have a real 
passion for their art. Mr. Honeycomb, I know, 
agrees with me, from his own experience. 

The gratitude I felt for this allusion to what I 
said to him one day at Button's was more than I 
can express. I could have kissed his hand out of 
love and reverence. '^ Sir," said I, " you may 
guess what I think of the happiness of poets, 
when it puts me in a state of delight inconceiva- 
ble to be supposed worthy of such a reference to 
my opinion." I was indeed in a confusion of 
pleasure. Mr. Walscott said it was fortunate the 
ladies had left us, or they might not have approved 
of such a total absorption in poetry. " Oh ! " cried 
Mr. Pope, " there we have you ; for the ladies are 



218 TABLE-TALK. 

a part of poetry ! We do not leave them out in 
our studies, depend upon it." 

I asked him whom he looked upon as the best 
love-poet among our former writers. I added 
" former," because the " Epistle of Heloise to 
Abelard " appears to me to surpass any express 
poem on that subject in the language. He said 
Waller ; but added, it was after a mode. " Every- 
thing," said Mr. Pope, " was after a mode, then. 
The best love-making is in Shakespeare. Love is 
a business by itself in Shakespeare, just as it is in 
nature." 

Me. Walscott. Do you think Juliet is natu- 
ral when she talks of cutting Romeo into " little 
stars," and making the heavens fine ? 

Mr. Pope. Yes ; I could have thought that, 
or anything else, of my mistress, when I was as 
young as Romeo and Juliet. Petrarch, as some- 
body was observing the other day, is natural for 
the same reason, in spite of the conceits which 
he mixes up with his passion ; nay, he is the more 
natural, supposing his passion to have been what 
I take it — that is to say, as deep and as wonder- 
working as a boy's. The best of us have been 
spoiled in these matters by the last age. Even 
Mr. Walsh, for all his good sense, was out in that 
affair, in his Preface. He saw very well that a 
man, to speak like a lover, should speak as he 
felt ; but he did not know that there were lovers 
who felt like Petrarch. 



CONVERSATION OF POPE. 219 

Mr. Walscott. You would admire the writ- 
ings of one Drummond, a Scotch gentleman, who 
was a great loyalist. 

Me. Pope. I know him well, and thank you 
for reminding me of him. If he had written a 
little later here in England, and been published 
under more favorable circumstances, he might 
have left Waller in a second rank. He was more 
in earnest, and knew all points of the passion. 
There is great tenderness in Drummond. He could 
look at the moon, and think of his mistress, with- 
out thinking how genteelly he should express 
it, which is what the other could not do. No ; 
we have really no love-poets, except the old dra- 
matic writers ; nor the French, either, since the 
time of Marot. 

Mr. Walscott. And very pretty writing it is, 
if managed as Mr. Pope manages it. 

Mr. Pope. I do not undervalue it, I assure 
you. After Shakespeare, I can still read Voiture, 
and like him very much : only it is like coming 
from country to town, from tragedy to the ridot- 
to. To tell you the truth, I am as fond of the 
better sort of those polite writers as any man can 
be ; and I feel my own strength to lie that way ; 
but I pique myself on having something in me 
besides, which they have not I am sure I should 
not have been able to write the " Epistle of Helo- 
ise," if I hadn't. There is a force and sincerity in 
the graver love-poets, even on the least spiritual 



220 TABLE-TALK. 

parts of the passion, which writers, the most os- 
tentatious on that score, might envy. 

Mr. Walscott. The tragedy of love includes 
the comedy, eh? 

Mr. Pope. Why, that is just about the truth 
of it, and is very well said. 

Mr. Pope's table is served with neatness and 
elegance. He drinks but sparingly. His eating 
is more with an appetite, but all nicely. After 
dinner, he set upon table some wine given him by 
my Lord Peterborough, which was excellent. He 
then showed us his grotto, till the ladies sent to 
say tea was ready. I never see a tea-table but I 
think of the " Rape of the Lock." Judge what I 
felt when I saw a Mrs. Fermor, kinswoman of 
Belinda, seated next Miss Martha Blount, who 
was making tea and coffee. There was an old 
lady with her ; and several neighbors came in 
from the village. This multitude disappointed 
me, for the talk became too general ; and my 
lord's wine, mixed with the other wine and the 
wit, having got a little in my head, and Mr. 
Pope's attention being repeatedly called to other 
persons, I can not venture to put down any more 
of his conversation. But I shall hear him again, 
and, I hope, again and again. So patience till 
next week. 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 221 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 

EEOOEDED BY THE SAME YI8IT0E. 

Juli/ 15, 1121. 

At length the dies optanda came. Shall I 
confess my weakness ? I could do nothing all 
the morning but walk about, now reading some- 
thing of the Dean's or Mr. Pope's, and now trying 
to think of some smart things to say at dinner ! 
I did not say one of them. Yes, I made an obser- 
vation on Sannazarius, which was well received. I 
must not forget the boatman who took me across 
the water from Sutton. "Young gentleman," 
says he, " if I may make so bold, I will tell you a 
piece of my mind." "Well, pray do." "Why, 
I'm thinking you're going to see your sweetheart, 
or else the great poet yonder, Mr. Pope." " Why 
so ? " said I, laughing. " Why," said he, " your 
eyes are all in a sparkle, and you seem in a 
woundy hurry." I told him he had guessed it. 
He is in the habit of taking visitors over ; great 
lords, he said, and grand ladies from court ; "and 
very merry, too, for all that." He mentioned Dr. 
Swift, Mr. Gay, and others. Upon asking if Dr. 
Swift was not one of the great writers, " Ay, ay," 
said he, " let him alone, I warrant him : he's a 
strange gentleman." The boatman told me that 
one day the Dean, " as they called him," quarreled 
with him about a halfpenny. His Reverence made 



222 TABLE-TALK. 

him tack about for some whimsey or other, and 
then would not pay him his due, because he did 
not tell him what the fare was the moment he 
asked. " So his Deanship left a cloak in the boat, 
and I took it up to him to Mr. Pope's house, and 
he came out and said, * Well, sirrah, there's some 
use in frightening you sneaking rascals, for you 
bring us back our goods.' So I thought it very 
strange ; and says I, ^ Your Reverence thinks I 
was frightened, eh?' ^Yes,' says he, as sharp as 
a needle ; ' haven't you done an honest action ? ' 
So I was thrown all of a heap to hear him talk in 
such a way ; and as I didn't well know what he 
meant, I grew redder and redder like, for want of 
gift of the gab. So says I at last, ' Well, if your 
Reverence, or Deanship, or what you please to be 
called, thinks as how I was frightened, all that I 
says is this : d — n me (saving your Reverence's 
presence) if Tom Harden is a man to be frightened 
about a halfpenny, like some folks that shall be 
nameless.' ' Oh, ho ! ' says Mr. Dean, looking 
scared, like an owl in an ivy-bush, ' Tom Harden 
is a mighty pretty fellow, and must not be flouted ; 
and so he won't row me again, I suppose, for all 
he has got a wife and a parcel of brats.' How 
he came to know that, I can't say. ^ No, no,' says 
I ; ^ I'm not so much of a pretty fellow as that 
comes to, if that's what they mean by a pretty 
fellow. It's not my business to be picking and 
choosing my fares, so that I gets my due. But I 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 223 

was right about the halfpenny for all that ; and 
if your Reverence wants to go a swan-hopping 
another time, you knows what's to pay.' So the 
Dean fell a-laughing like mad, and then looked 
very grave, and said, ^ Here, you, Mr. John Searle ' 
(for that's Mr. Pope's man's name) — ^ here, make 
Mr. Thomas Harden acquainted with the taste of 
your beer ; and do you, Mr. Thomas, take back 
the cloak, and let it stay another time in the boat 
till I want to return ; and, moreover, Thomas, 
keep the cloak always for me to go home o' nights 
in, and I will make it worth your while, and leave 
it you when I am dead, provided it's worn out 
enough.' I shall never forget all the odd things 
he said, for I talked 'em over with Mr. Searle. 
^And hark'ee, Mr. Thomas Harden,' says he, ^re- 
member,' says he, ^ and never forget it, that you 
love your wife and children better than your 
pride,' says he, ' and your pride,' says he, ^ better 
than a paltry Dean ; and those are two nice 
things to manage together.' And the Dean has 
been as good as his word, young gentleman ; 
and I keep his cloak ; and he came to my cot- 
tage yonder one day, and told my wife she 
was 'the prettiest creature of a plain woman' 
that he ever saw (did you ever hear the like o' 
that?) ; and he calls her Pannopy, and always 
asks how she does. I don't know why he calls 
her Pannopy — mayhap because her pots and 
pans were so bright ; for you'd ha' thought 



224 TABLE-TALK. 

they'd been silver, from the way he stared at 
'em." * 

Having heard of the Dean's punctuality, I was 
afraid I should be too late for my good behavior ; 
but Mr. Thomas reassured me by saying that he 
had carried his Reverence across three hours be- 
fore from Richmond, with Madam Blount. " He 
is in a mighty good humor," said he, '^ and will 
make you believe anything he likes, if you don't 
have a care." 

I was in very good time, but found the whole 
party assembled with the exception of Mrs. Pope. 
It was the same as before, with the addition of 
the Doctor. He is shorter and stouter than I had 
fancied him, with a face in which there is nothing 
remarkable, at first sight, but the blueness of the 
eyes. The boatman, however, had not prepared 
me for the extreme easiness and good-breeding of 
his manners. I had made a shallow conclusion. 
I expected something perpetually fluctuating be- 
tween broad mirth and a repelling self-assumption. 
Nothing could be more unlike what I found. His 
mirth, afterward, was at times broad enough, and 
the ardor and freedom of his spirit very evident ; 
but he has an exquisite mode, throughout, of 

* Probably from a strange line in Spenser, where he de- 
scribes the bower of Proteus : 

" There was his wonne ; ne living wight was seene, 
Save one old nymph, hight Panope, to keep it cleane.'^ 

— Faerie Queen, book iii. 



CONYERSATIOX OF SWIFT AND POPE. 225 

maintaining the respect of his hearers. Whether 
he is so always, I can not say. But I guess that 
he can make himself equally beloved where he 
pleases, and feared where he does not. It must 
be owned that his mimicry (for he does not dis- 
dain even that sometimes) would not be so well 
in the presence of foolish people. I suppose he 
is cautious of treating them with it. Upon the 
whole, partly owing to his manners, and partly 
to Mr. Pope's previous encouragement of me 
(which is sufficient to set up a man for anything), 
I felt a great deal more at my ease than I expect- 
ed, and was prepared for a day as good as the 
last. One of the great arts, I perceive, of these 
wits, if it be not rather to be called one of the 
best tendencies of their nature (I am loath to bring 
my modesty into question by saying what I think 
of it), is to set you at your ease, and enlist your 
self-love in their favor, by some exquisite recog- 
nition of the qualities or endeavors on which you 
most pride yourself, or are supposed to possess. 
It is in vain you tell yourself they may flatter you. 
You believe and love the flattery ; and let me add 
(though at the hazard of making my readers smile), 
you are bound to believe it, if the bestowers are 
men of known honesty and spirit, and above " buy- 
ing golden opinions " of everybody. I am not sin- 
cere when I call it an art. I believe it to be good- 
natured instinct, and the most graceful sympathy ; 
and having let this confession out, in spite of my- 
15 



226 TABLE-TALK. 

self, I beg my dear friends, the readers, to think 
the best they can of me, and proceed. The Dean 
is celebrated for a way he has of setting off his 
favors in this way, by an air of objection. Per- 
haps there is a little love of power and authority 
in this, but he turns it all to grace. Mr. Pope did 
me the honor of introducing me as a young gen- 
tleman for whom he had a particular esteem. The 
Dean acknowledged my bow in the politest man- 
ner ; and after asking whether this was not the 
Mr. Honeycomb of whom he had heard talk at 
the coffee-house, looked at me with a serious calm- 
ness, and said, " I would not have you believe, sir, 
everything Mr. Pope says of you." I believe I 
blushed, but without petulance. I answered that 
my self-love was doubtless as great as that of 
most young men, perhaps greater ;. and that if I 
confessed I gave way to it in such an instance as 
the present, something was to be pardoned to me 
on the score of the temptation. " But," said he, 
" Mr. Pope flatters beyond all bounds. He intro- 
duces a new friend to us, and pretends that we 
are too liberal to be jealous. He trumpets up 
some young wit, Mr. Honeycomb, and fancies, in 
the teeth of all evidence, moral and political, that 
we are to be in love with our successors." I 
bowed and blushed, indeed, at this. I said that, 
whether a real successor or not, I should now, at 
all events, run the common danger of greatness, 
in being spoilt by vanity ; and that, like a subtle 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 227 

prince in possession, the Dean knew how to pre- 
vent his heirs presumptive from becoming of any 
value. The Doctor laughed, and said, with the 
most natural air in the world : " I have read some 
pretty things of yours, Mr. Honeycomb, and am 
happy to make your acquaintance. I hope the 
times will grow smoother as you get older, and 
that you will furnish a new link, some day or 
other, to reunite friends that ought not to have 
been separated." This was an allusion to certain 
Whig patrons of mine. It affected me much ; 
and I gladly took the opportunity of the silence 
required by good-breeding, to lay my hand upon 
my heart, and express my gratitude by another 
bow. He saw how nearly he had touched me ; 
for, turning to Mr. Pope, he said gayly: "There 
is more love in our hates nowadays than there 
used to be in the loves of the wits, when you and 
I were as young as Mr. Honeycomb. What did 
you care for old Wycherley ? or what did Wycher- 
ley care for Rochester, compared with the fond 
heats and vexations of us party-men ? " Mr. 
Pope's answer was prevented by the entrance 
of his mother. The Dean approached her as if 
she had been a princess. The good old lady, 
however, looked as if she was to be upon her 
good behavior, now that the Dean was present ; 
and Mrs. Martha Blount, notwithstanding he pays 
court to her, had an air of the same kind. I am 
told that he keeps all the women in awe. This 



228 TABLE-TALK. 

must be one of the reasons for their being so fond 
of him, when he chooses to be pleased. Mr. Wal- 
scott, whose manners are simple and sturdy, could 
not conceal a certain uneasiness of admiration ; 
and, though a great deal more at my ease than I 
had looked to be, I partook of the same feeling. 
With Mr. Pope, all is kindness on one part, and 
pleased homage on the other. Dr. Swift keeps 
one upon the alert, like a field-officer. Yet, ex- 
ternally, he is as gentle, for the most part, as his 
great friend. 

The dinner seemed to be still more neat and 
perfect than the last, though I believe there were 
no more dishes. But the cookery had a more con- 
summate propriety. The Dean's influence, I sup- 
pose, pierces into the kitchen. I could not help 
fancying that the dishes were sensible of it, and 
submitted their respective relishes with anxiety. 
The talk, as usual, began upon eating. 

Mr. Pope. I verily believe, that when people 
eat and drink too much, if it is not in the ardor 
of good company, they do it, not so much for the 
sake of eating, as for the want of something bet- 
ter to do. 

Dr. Swift. That is as true a thing as you ever 
said. When I was very solitary in Ireland, I used 
to eat and drink twice as much as at any other 
time. Dinner was a great relief. It cut the day 
in two. 

Mr. Pope. I have often noticed, that if I am 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 229 

alone, and take up a book at dinner-time, and get 
concerned in it, I do not care to eat any more. 
What I took for an unsatisfied hunger leaves me 
— is no more thought of. 

Dk. Swift. People mean as much when they 
say that such and such a thing is meat and drink 
to them. By the same rule, meat and drink is 
one's book. At Laracor, an omelet was Quint us 
Curtius to me ; and the beef, being an epic dish, 
Mr. Pope's Homer. 

Me. Walscott. You should have dressed it 
yourself, Mr. Dean, to have made it as epic as 
that. 

Dr. Swift. 'Faith ! I was no hero, and could 
not afford the condescension. A poor vicar must 
have a servant to comfort his pride, and keep him 
in heart and starvation. 

Mk. Walscott. If people eat and drink for 
want of something better to do, there is no fear 
that men of genius will die of surfeiting. They 
must have their thoughts to amuse them, if no- 
thing else. 

The Dean (with vivacity). Their thoughts ! 
Their fingers' ends, to bite till the blood come. 
That, Mr. Walscott, depends on the state of the 
health. I was once returning to dinner at Lara- 
cor, when I saw a grave little shabby-looking fel- 
low sitting on a stile. I asked him what he did 
idling there. He answered, very philosophically, 
that he was the Merry Andrew lately arrived, and 



230 TABLE-TALK. 

that, witli my leave, he would drink my health in 
a little more fresh air, for want of a better draught. 
I told him I was a sort of Merry Andrew myself, 
and so invited him to dinner. The poor man be- 
came very humble and thankful, and turned out a 
mighty sensible fellow ; so I got him a place with 
an undertaker, and he is now merry in good ear- 
nest. I put some pretty '^ thoughts " in his head 
before he left me. A cousin of mine sent them 
me from Lisbon, in certain long-necked bottles, 
corked and sealed up. My Lord Peterborough 
has a cellar full of very pretty thoughts. God 
grant we all keep our health ! and then, young 
gentleman (looking very seriously at me, for I 
believe he thought my countenance expressed 
a little surprise) — and then we shall turn our 
thoughts to advantage for ourselves and for 
others. 

Mrs. Pope. If there's any gentleman who 
could do without his wine, I think it must be my 
lord. When I was a little girl, I fancied that 
great generals were all tall stately persons, with 
one arm akimbo, and a truncheon held out in the 
other ; and I thought they all spoke grand, and 
like a book. 

Dr. Swift. Madam, that was Mr. Pope's poe- 
try, struggling to be born before its time. 

Mrs. Pope. I protest, when I first had the 
honor of knowing my Lord Peterborough, he al- 
most frightened me with his spirits. I believe he 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 231 

saw it ; for all of a sudden lie became the finest, 
softest-spoken gentleman that I ever met with ; 
and I fell in love with him. 

Mes. Blount. Oh, madam, I shall tell ! and 
we'll all dance at my lady's wedding. 

I do not know which was the handsomer sight; 
the little blush that came over the good old lady's 
cheek as she ended her speech, or the affectionate 
pleasantness with which her son regarded her. 

Mr. Pope. You did not fall in love with Lord 
Peterborough because he is such a fine-spoken 
gentleman, but because he is a fine gentleman and 
a madcap besides. I know the tastes of you ladies 
of the civil wars. 

The Deax. 'Tis a delicious rogue ! (and then, 
as if he had spoken too freely before strangers) — 
'tis a great and rare spirit ! If all the world re- 
sembled Lord Peterborough, they might do with- 
out consciences. I know no fault in him, but that 
he is too fond of fiddlers and singers. 

Mr. Pope. Here is Mr. Honeycomb, who will 
venture to dispute with you on that point. 

I said Mr. Pope paid me too great a compli- 
ment. I might venture to differ from Dr. Swift, 
but hardly to dispute with him. 

Dr. Swift. Oh, Mr. Honeycomb, you are too 
modest, and I must pull down your pride. You 
have heard of little Will Harrison, poor lad, who 
wrote the " Medicine for the Ladies," in the " Tat- 
ler." Well, he promised to be one of your great 



232 TABLE-TALK. 

wits, and was very mucli of a gentleman ; and so 
he took to wearing thin waistcoats, and died of a 
birthday suit. Now, thin waistcoats and soft 
sounds are both of 'em bad habits, and encourage 
a young man to keep late hours, and get his death 
o' cold. 

I asked whether he could not admit a little 
" higher argument " in the musician than the 
tailor. Shakespeare says of a flute, that it ^^ dis- 
coursed excellent music," as if it had almost been 
a rational creature. 

T>R. Swift. A rational fiddlestick ! It is not 
Shakespeare that says it, but Hamlet, who was 
out of his wits. Yes, I have heard a flute dis- 
course. Let me see — I have heard a whole room- 
ful of 'em discourse (and then he played off an 
admirable piece of mimicry, which ought to have 
been witnessed, to do it justice). Let me see — 
let me see. The flute made the following excel- 
lent remarks : Tootle, tootle, tootle, tootle — tootle, 
tootle tee ; and then again, which I thought a new 
observation. Tootle, tootle, tootle, with my reedle, 
tootle ree. Upon which the violin observed, in a 
very sprightly manner, Niddle, niddle, niddle, 
niddle, niddle, niddle nee, with my nee, with my 
long nee ; which the bass-viol, in his gruff but 
sensible way, acknowledged to be as witty a thing 
as he had ever heard. This was followed by a 
general discourse, in which the violin took the 
lead, all the rest questioning and reasoning with 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 233 

one another, as hard as they could drive, to the 
admiration of the beholders, who were never tired 
of listening. They must have carried away a 
world of thoughts. For my part, my deafness 
came upon me. I never so much lamented it. 
There was a long story told by a hautboy, which 
was considered so admirable that the whole band 
fell into a transport of scratching and tooting. I 
observed the flute's mouth water, probably at 
some remarks on green peas, which had just come 
in season. It might have been guessed, by the 
gravity of the hearers, that the conversation chief- 
ly ran upon the new king and queen ; but I be- 
lieve it was upon periwigs ; for turning to that 
puppy Rawlinson, and asking what he concluded 
from all that, he had the face to tell me that it 
gave him a " heavenly satisfaction." 

We laughed heartily at this sally against music. 

Dr. Swift was very learned on the dessert. 
He said he owed his fructification to Sir William 
Temple. I observed that it was delightful to see 
so great a man as Sir William Temple so happy 
as he appears to have been. The otium cum dig- 
nitate is surely nowhere to be found, if not as he 
has painted it in his works. 

Dr. Swift. The otium cum digging potatoes 
is better. I could show you a dozen Irishmen 
(which is a great many for thriving ones) who 
have the advantage of him. Sir William was a 
great, but not a happy man. He had an ill stom- 



234 TABLE-TALK. 

ach. What is worse, he gave me one. He taught 
me to eat platefuls of cherries and peaches, when 
I took no exercise. 

A. H. What can one trust to, if the air of 
tranquillity in his writings is not to be depended 
on? 

Mr. Pope. I believe he talks too much of his 
ease, to be considered very easy. It is an ill head 
that takes so much concern about its pillow. 

Dr. Swift. Sir William Temple was a martyr 
to the " good sense " that came up in those days. 
He had sick blood, that required stirring ; but be- 
cause it was a high strain of good sense to agree 
with Epicurus and be of no religion, it was thought 
the highest possible strain, in anybody who should 
not go so far, to live in a garden as Epicurus did, 
and lie quiet, and be a philosopher. So Epicurus 
got a great stone in his kidneys ; and Sir William 
used to be out of temper if his oranges got 
smutted. 

I thought there was a little spleen in this ac- 
count of Temple, which surprised me, considering 
old times. But if it be true that the giddiness, 
and even deafness, to which the Dean is subject, 
is owing to the philosopher's bad example, one 
can hardly wonder at its making him melancholy. 
He sat amid a heap of fruit without touching it. 

Mr. Pope. Sir William, in his ''Essay on 
Gardening," says he does not know how it is that 
Lucretius's account of the gods is thought more 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 235 

impious than Homer's, who makes them as full of 
bustle and bad passions as the meanest of us. 
Now, it is very clear : for the reason is, that Ho- 
mer's gods have something in common with us, 
and are subject to our troubles and concerns ; 
whereas Lucretius's live like a parcel of bons-vi- 
va7its by themselves, and care for nobody. 

The Dean. There are two admirable good 
things in that essay. One is an old usurer's, who 
said that '^ no man could have peace of conscience 
that run out of his estate." The other is a Span- 
ish proverb, that " a fool knows more in his own 
house than a wise man in another's." 

The conversation turning upon our discussion 
last time respecting anglers, the Dean said he once 
asked a scrub who was fishing if he ever caught 
the fish called the Scream. The man protested he 
had never heard of such a fish. " What ! " says 
the Doctor, " you an angler, and never heard of 
the fish that gives a shriek when coming out of 
the water ? It is true it is not often found in these 
parts ; but ask any Grim Tartar, and he will tell 
you of it. 'Tis the only fish that has a voice ; 
and a sad, dismal sound it is." The man asked 
who could be so barbarous as to angle for a crea- 
ture that shrieked ? " That," says the Doctor, " is 
another matter : but what do you think of fellows 
that I have seen, whose only reason for hooking 
and tearing all the fish they can get at, is that 
they do not scream ? " I shouted this not in 



236 TABLE-TALK. 

his ear, and he almost shuffled himself into the 
river. 

Mb. Walscott. Surely, Mr. Dean, this argu- , 
ment would strike the dullest. 

Dr. Swift. Yes, if you could turn it into a 
box on the ear. Not else. They would fain give 
you one meantime, if they had the courage ; for 
men have such a perverse dread of the very notion 
of doing wrong, that they would rather do it than 
be told of it. You know Mr. Wilcox of Hertford- 
shire? (to Mr. Pope). I once convinced him he 
did an inhuman thing in angling ; at least, I must 
have gone very near to convince him ; for he cut 
short the dispute by referring me to his friends 
for a good character. It gives one the spleen to 
see an honest man make such an owl of himself. 

Mr. Pope. And all anglers, perhaps, as he 
was ? 

Dr. Swift. Very likely, 'faith. A parcel of 
sneaking, scoundrelly understandings get some 
honest man to do as they do, and then, forsooth, 
must dishonor him with the testimony of their 
good opinion. No : it requires a very rare be- 
nevolence, or as great an understanding, to see be- 
yond even such a paltry thing as this angling, in 
angling times ; about as much as it would take 
a good honest-hearted cannibal to see further than ' 
man-eating, or a goldsmith beyond his money. 
What ! isn't Tow-wow a good husband and jaw- 
breaker ; and must he not stand upon reputation ? 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 237 

Mr. Walscott. It is common to hear people 
among the lower orders talk of " the poor dumb 
animal," when they desire to rescue a cat or dog 
from ill treatment. 

The Dean. Yes ; and the cat is not dumb, 
nor the dog either. A horse is dumb ; a fish is 
dumber ; and I suppose this is the reason why 
the horse is the worst used of any creature, ex- 
cept trout and grayling. Come : this is melan- 
choly talk. Mrs. Patty, why didn't you smoke 
the bull ? 

Mrs. Blount. Smoke the bull, sir ? 

Dr. Swift. Yes ; I have just made a bull. I 
said horses were dumb, and fish dumber. 

Mrs. Pope. Pray, Mr. Dean, why do they call 
those kind of mistakes bulls ? 

Dr. Swift. Why, madam, I can not tell ; but 
I can tell you the prettiest bull that ever was 
made. An Irishman laid a wager with another, 
a bricklayer, that he could not carry him to the 
top of a building in his hod. The fellow took 
him up, and, at the risk of both their necks, 
landed him safely. " Well," cried the other, 
" you have done it ; there's no denying that ; but 
at the fourth story I had hopes." 

Mr. Pope. Doctor, I believe you take the 
word smolce to be a modern cant phrase. I found 
it, when I was translating Homer, in old Chap- 
man. He says that Juno " smoked " Ulysses 
through his disguise. 



238 TABLE-TALK. 

Mention was made of the strange version of 
Hobbes. 

Mr. Pope. You recollect, Mr. Honeycomb, 
the passage in the first book of Homer, where 
Apollo comes down to destroy the Greeks, and 
how his quiver sounded as he came ? 

" Yes, sir," said I, " very well " : and I quoted 
from his translation : 

" Fierce as he moved, the silver shafts resound.'' 

Mr. Pope. I was speaking of the original ; 
but that line will do very well to contrast with 
Hobbes. What think you of 

" His arrows chink as often as he jogs ! " 

Mr. Pope mentioned another passage just as 
ridiculous. I forget something of the first line, 
and a word in the second. Speaking of Jupiter, 
he says : 

" With that his great black brow he nodded ; 

Wherewith (astonished) were the powers divine : 
Oljmpus shook at shaking of his God-head, 
And Thetis from it jumped into the brine." 

Mr. Pope. Dryden good-naturedly says of 
Hobbes, that he took to poetry when he was too 
old. 

Dean Swift (with an arch look). Perhaps 
had he begun at forty, as Dryden did, he would 
have been as great as my young master. 



CONVERSATION OF SWIFT AND POPE. 239 

Mr. Walscott could not help laughing to hear 
Dry den, and at forty, called " my young master." 
However, he was going to say something, but de- 
sisted. I wish I could recollect many more things 
that were said, so as to do them justice. Alto- 
gether, the day was not quite so pleasant as the 
form^er one. With Mr. Pope, one is both tran- 
quil and delighted. Dr. Swift somehow makes 
me restless. I could hear him talk all day long, 
but should like to be walking half the time, in- 
stead of sitting. Besides, he did not appear quite 
easy himself, notwithstanding what the boatman 
said ; and he looked ill. I am told he is very 
anxious about the health of a friend in Ireland. 



THE EI^D. 



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